Scandal is sweeping the California Democratic Party as it turns out that campaign coffers for national and state elections have been looted by a prominent Party operative. The WSJ has the story: Accusations that a campaign treasurer stole more than $1 million from Democratic candidates across California have jolted the party on the eve of […]

The spirit of Gamal Abdel Nasser is back – only this time he’s Turkish. Prime Minister Erdogan’s Arab Spring tour enjoyed rapturous reception on its first leg in Cairo on Tuesday – a hallmark of his increasing popularity and influence among Arabs. The Wall Street Journal reports: In Cairo’s Opera House on Tuesday, the standing ovations, chants […]

Asians are getting older. As a report from the Asia Development Bank and a story in the FT tell us, aging populations across Asia will have a significant effect on economic productivity over the next several decades: …the surge in the Asian workforce that began in the 1950s with changes in the birth and death rates contributed […]

Will they or won’t they?  The question agitating world stock markets the last couple of sessions is whether China will help Europe avoid defaults by buying up the bonds of troubled countries.During the current euro-crisis, many of the debtor countries have been persistently hopeful that an angel was going to descend from the sky and […]

Chrysler is experimenting with a two-tier pay system – high wages for experienced older workers and about half that salary for new, young recruits. Economists are excited because it brings in jobs without overburdening the company’s payroll; Via Meadia, on the other hand, sees the arrangement as just another battlefield in the war against the […]

The evidence keeps piling up that neither the election of Barack Obama or the semi-retirement of Fidel Castro has changed the basic pattern of US-Cuba relations.Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is the latest pawn in America and Cuba’s long-running chess match. The Cuban government invited Richardson to Havana discuss the fate of Alan Gross […]

One of the most talked-about items in Obama’s new jobs proposal is also one of the most questionable: job training programs for minors and the unemployed. On the surface, this seems like a smart idea — providing American workers with the skills needed to navigate an economy that has changed dramatically over the past twenty […]

We noted earlier that Venezuela’s feisty President Hugo Chavez was repatriating his country’s gold hoard from London, apparently fearing international sanctions or seizures by angry foreign creditors.  Now he seems to be deepening the country’s defenses against foreign claimants by preparing to withdraw from a major global forum for the settlement of investor disputes. From […]

The growth of India and China may be the wonder of the world, but it depends on a lot of little things going right: institutions, workforce, transportation, logistics, energy, and the like.These days, energy threatens to be a roadblock in India’s path.  Oil and gas involve deals with countries like Iran; domestically India’s biggest resource […]

The chattering class has spent the past week dissecting the new memoir from much-reviled former VP Dick Cheney. The reaction has been mostly negative and will do little to revive his tarnished reputation. The Washington Post criticizes Cheney for failing to learn from the Iraq experience: Yet in his new memoir, “In My Time,” Cheney […]