A year in the White House

A year ago this week, Barack Obama officially became America's 44th president. Christopher Hancock, marketing strategist at Brown Advisory, looks at the economic challenges he has faced and the tests still ahead

In 1876, Isma’il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, sold his 44% share in the Suez Canal Company to the United Kingdom for £3,967,582. Pasha’s ambitious public policies collapsed beneath his country’s mounting foreign debt; and, eventually, his British creditors claimed the world’s most strategic waterway as partial restitution. English influence over Egyptian soil inevitably wore thin. By 1956, Anglo-Egyptian tensions had peaked, and on July 26, in a speech delivered in Alexandria’s Mohammad Ali Square, President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered Egyptian forces to reclaim the canal. The Suez Crisis ...