Can’t say we didn’t warn you. Municipal bankruptcies are back in the news today in a big way, with the FT reporting that Jefferson County, Alabama has filed for the largest such bankruptcy in history after a deal with its creditors fell apart overnight.The story is filled with the usual cast of characters: failed infrastructure […]

With the attention of the mainstream media fixed on Europe, Via Meadia readers will be aware that trouble brewing in Argentina could blindside the global economy. Some in the economics establishment might disagree, but the chorus of concerned voices is growing — noted economist and prolific blogger Tyler Cowen picks up on the story today.While […]

Did a Tennessee preacher’s book kill? It’s a topic for debate after three homeschooled children died from corporal punishment. In each case, the parents had been reading Michael and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up a Child.  The NYT reports: More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially […]

At a crucial moment during the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral John Jervis, first Earl of St. Vincent, famously wrote in a dispatch, “I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.” Over 200 years later, St. Vincent’s prediction is coming true: the French are […]

“All political lives end in failure,” said Enoch Powell, but few fail as comprehensively as Silvio Berlusconi.  He leaves office with his personal reputation in a shambles; bunga bunga parties at which septuagenarians courted the favor of under-aged prostitutes will be the most vivid image indelibly linked to his name.  Criminal and civil court actions […]

A typical US household headed by a person over the age of 65 is 47 times wealthier than a typical household headed by someone under the age of 35. 47 times. Politico has the story: The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 years or older was $170,494, up 42 percent from 1984. Meanwhile, […]

After the dramatic rightward shift in 2010 swept a wave of Republican governors and legislators into office, the country has seen a flurry of new conservative initiatives. One year later, the voters have spoken again: in Arizona, Mississippi and most importantly in Ohio they are saying too much, too extreme, too fast. The New York […]

[Updated version]$92.8 million. That’s the size of the penalty handed down yesterday to convicted hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. The NYT reports: Combined with the fines and forfeitures ordered last month when he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading, Mr. Rajaratnam will be paying a total of $156.6 million…Mr. Rajaratnam’s lawyers […]

The Roman Catholic Church has had difficulties with modernity for a long time. In 1861 Pope Pius IX (famous for his Syllabus of Errors, an exhaustive compendium of modern heresies) made matters very clear in a famous “allocution”, which rejected the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to […]

A lot of the world spends its time oscillating between the gleeful anticipation of American decline and the detailed analysis of those endlessly clever American plots that keep the inevitable, surely approaching decline at bay.  The rise of new powers like China and Brazil has been supporting the decline school of late, but sooner rather […]