Spend enough time inside a central bank and you stop looking at transactions. You start looking at flows. That one shift in altitude is, I think, the biggest blind spot in how a lot of crypto exchanges run anti-money-laundering today… Read More ›
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Manchuria & Korea: One Economic Development Model, Sort Of
There is genuine and well-documented continuity from Manchurian economic development to Korea’s economic development today, but the more careful argument — made by Carter Eckert, Bruce Cumings, Han Suk-jung (한석정), Kang Sang-jung (姜尚中 / 강상중), Atul Kohli, and Chalmers Johnson… Read More ›
The Fall of Ming (明)
The end of Ming (明) (1368-1644) was about eight weeks of events that — literally — ended an empire. Note: Wu Sangui did not intend to give China to the Qing. He made a desperate tactical alliance against Li Zicheng… Read More ›
The Explanation Matters More Than the Indignation
The men who launched the American Revolution (1763–1791) were not saints — there were slaveholders, speculators, and schemers among them — but they wagered everything on a set of Enlightenment propositions that no government had ever been founded on before:… Read More ›
Navigating the End of the Rules-Based Order
May 2026.1 I. Context: The End of the Inter-Cold War Period The roughly three-decade interval following the collapse of the Soviet Union, during which China and Russia turned inward toward domestic consolidation and the United States broadly upheld the post-1945… Read More ›
Colonialism and the Roots of the Modern Economy
Nobody walks away from the slave trade with their dignity intact. If colonialism is the second-worst thing humans have ever done to one another, the Atlantic trade has a strong claim on first place — and the two are less… Read More ›
East Asia in English: From FEER to Today
Part 1: Origins and the Davies era (1946–1989) The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) was founded in Hong Kong in 1946 with seed capital from the Kadoorie family, Jardines, and HSBC by Eric Halpern, a Viennese Jewish émigré who had… Read More ›
Korea in English: It Ain’t All There
The Korea that exists in English is not the same as the Korea that exists in Korean. There is a gap. Below, I try to outline that gap. The two English flagships and how people see them The Korea Times… Read More ›
What’s Wrong With Busan?
The below draws on Korean-language reporting and academic sources. I’ve kept it focused on political dynamics inside Busan City Hall (부산광역시청) and its relationship with South Gyeongsang Province (경상남도), with the structural macro factors (i.e., Seoul’s popularity) only as context…. Read More ›
Gregory's Writings 