“They are stealing everything that isn’t bolted down, and it’s getting exponentially worse”. So said Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI), commenting on the explosion of China-based cyber espionage directed at the West. From biotech to aerospace, hackers in China are stealing secrets left and right. Here’s the story at Bloomberg: The hackers’ interest in companies as […]

“Can we have a summit?” asked Zerohedge’s twitter feed last night.  The effects of the last European summit (yet another agreement to agree at some undisclosed point in the future) are wearing off and the exuberance is out of the markets.  Though central banks are printing money as fast as they can, asset prices are […]

Not long ago it appeared Ankara and Tehran were the best of friends. Today that situation is different. From Iraq to Lebanon and across the Middle East, Turkey and Iran are locked in a zero sum competition for influence and power. Here’s the story from the FT: Iran has criticised Turkey’s secular system of government […]

Both those who say no and yes are right, in a way.

Don’t trust economic forecasters: that’s the message from Citigroup’s Economic Surprise Index. As Derek Thompson explains at the Atlantic, “A high Surprise Index indicates that economic figures have been stronger than analysts projected. A low Surprise Index indicates that the economy is doing much worse than analysts predict.”Remember — those who try to predict the […]

5,000 people dead, including 300 children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands missing. Ongoing violence. Gun battles in the streets, aerial bombardment of cities. Welcome to Syria, where the awesome moral force of the “duty to protect” can be seen in all its majesty and might. Every day we hear more about Butcher Assad’s war on activists, protestors, […]

Here at Via Meadia we’ve been tracking the problems facing young graduates entering a lousy job market without marketable skills. A BBC video report indicates that the U.S. isn’t the only place with this problem — China has it too. The past decade has seen increasing numbers of Chinese attending universities to improve their chances […]

Yesterday it was South Korea, today it’s Vietnam: the future is looking less and less rosy for the emerging economies of Asia. The cheap, export-based development model that made Asian economies the envy of the world in the 2000s is in for some serious shocks as it enters its second decade of life. An FT […]

Iran is not a good place for anybody except a few mullahs and their thuggish cronies these days, but it is a particularly bad place to be a Christian. Via Meadia wrote in August about the plight of Pastor Yusef Nadarkhani, an Iranian Christian leader, who was imprisoned in 2009, pressured to convert back to Islam, […]

The Virginia retirement system, one of the few systems in the country to be in reasonably good shape just a few years ago, is in trouble, says the Washington Examiner.  The reason: poor returns in the markets and cretinous, cowardly decisions by the legislature to cut the state contributions to the fund in order to […]