Here’s something we haven’t seen in a while—good news for California’s Calpers pension fund. After earning only 1 percent on its investments in 2011, Calpers rebounded in 2012, earning 12.5 percent, well above the expected rate of return of 7.5 percent. As Bloomberg notes, this growth was largely driven by the strong performance of the stock market […]

In an opinion piece for the Financial Times yesterday, the Environmental Defense Fund’s vice president and its senior economist defended the EU’s carbon cap-and-trade system. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme has fallen on hard times; carbon permits were over-allocated, leading to an extremely low price of carbon (the current price for a permit is roughly one-seventh its price […]

As the money runs low, life in the blue model box is becoming Darwinian: cash-strapped governments are attempting to squeeze traditionally tax-exempt enterprises for revenue. The WSJ reports that Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signed a bill allowing the town of Smithfield to bill Bryan University for public safety services: Most states, including Rhode Island, […]

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited several disputed islands a few hours after his government announced a new defense strategy that included the right to preemptively attack aggressive foreign forces and organize a new coast guard unit to protect Japan’s coastlines and islands.Abe spoke to coast guard officers on Ishigaki Island, which is part of Okinawa Prefecture […]

Yesterday Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius compared opponents of the Affordable Care Act to opponents of civil rights legislation. In remarks at the 104th NAACP Annual Conference, Sebelius said: The Affordable Care Act is the most powerful law for reducing health disparities since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the same year the Voting […]

Atheists have been in the news lately, often in connection with lawsuits in defense of their right to the free exercise of their worldview and for equal treatment with religious worldviews. Such litigation has occurred in both the United States and Europe, but the latter is more secularized, which makes for a rather different situation. […]

Forty-two-year-old Tabish Gauhar wants to turn on the lights in Karachi. But when he tried to make the necessary reforms to the Karachi Electricity Supply Company so that he and his fellow citizens could do something we all take for granted, workers rioted and looted his office, the government tried to arrest him, and gunmen threatened to […]

The US has a law on the books, the Renewable Fuel Standard, that mandates an ever-increasing amount of ethanol to be blended into gasoline. Under the 2007 law, oil companies must blend the required amount of ethanol or, in lieu of that, buy credits, known as renewable identification numbers (RINs). The price of those credits […]

An EU recovery is still a distant proposition. The latest evidence: New car sales in June were down 5.6 percent from last year, and new car registrations are down 6.2 percent from 2012. The FT reports: June’s sales total was the lowest since 1996, but was marginally better than a 5.9 per cent slide in May to […]

Students looking for options beyond the two- or four-year college path should consider certificate programs, which community colleges are offering in higher numbers and in many specialties. The WSJ reports: [C]ertificate programs not only cost less on average than a year at college but they also bring higher salaries than those received by job candidates […]