Vamp. Siren. Seductress.

Egypt s Economic Siren

Or Hollywood's siren call?

When we think about why we hear, we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren, although clearly that's an important thing.

The apparent lack of a tsunami warning siren in Palu, even though a warning had been in effect, is likely to have contributed to the loss of life.

This prideful interpretation amounted to the siren song of an extremely accommodative monetary policy. Unable to disentangle the global and domestic pressures suppressing inflation, a price targeting Fed has erred consistently on the side of easy money.

We are missing my mother's story, who made sure with every siren, with every raid, with every cut off of electricity, she played puppet shows for my brothers and I, so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions.

In France, the siren song of appeasement is becoming a national rallying cry, from the far right National Front to far left elements and among a growing number of mainstream politicians of all stripes. Indeed, the Kremlin has assiduously cultivated party secretariats across Europe.

Hubristic presidents contemplating Churchill s bust in their office are prone to believe that they have been called upon to be war presidents that they, like Churchill in 1940, must oppose the next Hitler. This siren song drew the US into Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Time and again, regulators and policymakers to say nothing of political leaders have been asleep at the switch in condoning market excesses. In a globalized world where labor income is under constant pressure, the siren song of asset markets as a growth elixir is far too tempting for the body politic to resist.

For too long, African governments have listened to the siren song of free trade and have suffered from too much openness, not too little. With the US and the European Union unwilling to slash their farm subsidies, Uganda s rice experiment deserves wider attention, if only because it shows that Africans aren t merely passive victims of international economic forces.

PARIS The Japanese and the British may seem very different, but a closer look reveals something akin to a parallel destiny for these two island peoples. With their old imperial ambitions and widespread distaste for the great continents from which the narrowest of seas divide them, both the British and the Japanese are vulnerable to the siren song of isolationism.

But Abe s government also recognizes that the world s geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting, and that many in the US are tempted by the siren song of isolationism. So Abe feels obliged to put Japan in a position to be able to help Asia s democracies manage any crisis that may emerge in the event of a change in America s regional presence.