Argentina’s President did something so amazing today that it made the world news: she announced that she’s converting her last dollar bank account into pesos.But don’t worry; this isn’t a story about the decline of the dollar.Argentina wasted the 20th century lurching from one ill-considered economic experiment to the next. Many worked temporarily; the country’s […]

Dragged down by inclement weather in soybean producing regions of the country, recently published numbers from Brazil’s statistical agency were absolutely dismal: GDP grew only 0.2 per cent quarter-on-quarter and a meager 0.8 year-on-year. Still, the 7.3 per cent contraction in agricultural output is not what really bothers local and foreign analysts.The deeper problem is […]

This week’s episode on the US-China squabble channel is about pollution. The American embassy in Beijing has been tweeting hourly pollution levels from a device installed on its roof for about three years, something the Chinese have never been comfortable with. This week the Chinese officially demanded that foreign embassies cease broadcasting independent assessments of […]

The $125 billion Spanish bank bailout announced this weekend is more of the same: another temporary dose of pain meds that (we hope) prevents a market meltdown for a while but does not address the underlying conditions.Fair enough, in a way; Via Meadia has no desire to see a full blown European financial panic and […]

Turkey’s increasing presence and clout in its neighborhood is expanding further abroad to east Africa. The Christian Science Monitor reports: At the conference [on Somalia, held in Istanbul], Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized other nations for lacking Turkey’s on-the-ground presence in Somalia.“Without living there you cannot devise the correct policies and you cannot help. […]

New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo has been one of the Democratic Party’s most visible fighters in the struggle against the entrenched interests of the blue social model. As the NY Times reports, he is taking on the public sector unions, and some of his most important allies are private sector unions.The Committee to Save New […]

If Iran does get the bomb, there is a tight logic to military cooperation between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to match it. U.S. options for preventing a Pak-Saudi nuke may diminish sharply over time.

If American power recedes from the Middle East in the advancing post-Cold War era, Israel's strategic circumstances, not least its concern about a nuclearizing Iran, could start to look a lot like they did in Isaiah's time.

We usually think of John Kenneth Galbraith as the archetypal liberal—and not without reason. But Galbraith's late 1950s understanding of the interplay between the sources of poverty and public policy remediation was far more realistic, and in every way superior, to what came after him. A look back is both enlightening and, frankly, a bit depressing, given the profound confusion we have been mired in ever since.

The percentage of Americans living alone has never been higher. While there is every reason to worry about the social implications of the data, Eric Klinenberg is alone and loving it—for all the wrong reasons.