The long, slow decline of the U.S. Postal Service is old hat at this point, but the magnitude of the failure still makes it feel like genuine news sometimes. As this Bloomberg report (h/t Zerohedge) shows, in the past quarter alone, the USPS lost $5.2 billion—nearly 70 percent higher than a similar figure last year (when, we […]

As student loan debt surpasses credit-card debt as the leading liability for Americans, the reality of a “higher-ed bubble” is becoming increasingly obvious. Yet it isn’t just the students that are going broke; a new report from the Economist suggests that the same fate is befalling everyone connected to higher education, including the universities themselves: Federal […]

In a recent high-level meeting, Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev raised an issue that has increasingly been on Russia’s mind of late: immigration to Russia’s Far East. The Far East is a huge, thinly populated area thousands of miles from the rest of the country, with little direct contact with Moscow or the country’s other […]

Raghuram Rajan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and former Chief Economist at the IMF, will be India’s next chief economic advisor, the Wall Street Journal reports.Rajan’s appointment could be good news for India, which is currently in a pessimistic mood—partly due to the monsoon, partly due to the […]

If ever there were a unifying cause in the Middle East, it would be the scramble between America, Israel, and Sunni states in the Persian Gulf to contain an intransigent Iran. The U.S. wants a balance of power in the region, not Iranian hegemony; Israel can’t afford the security risks of such a hegemony; and […]

More bad news from the Golden State: apparently not content with creating what amounts to a free life-insurance policy for state employees, California legislators are considering creating another open-ended budget commitment. This time, the new commitment will go to private-sector workers rather than public employees.SB1234, a new bill currently working its way through the state legislature, aims […]

Not long ago Via Meadia discussed the possibility of an internationalization of the Syria crisis, with Turkey and Iran being the chief belligerents. Events this week are edging closer to a wider Middle East war amid the crumbling wreckage of the Levant:First, on Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan declared his government’s willingness to invade Syria to crush what might […]

Take a look at the latest grim economic data from Europe: Industrial output in Spain dropped for the tenth straight month, and now the German economy appears to be spluttering: German exports, a major source of growth for the country, fell in June for the month, after recovering the previous month from an earlier decline, […]

Americans don’t expect good economic news anytime soon, according to a new poll by Discover Financial Services’ U.S. Spending Monitor: the portion of consumers that expect the economy will get worse rose to more than half for the first time this year–up 4 percentage points at 53%–as sentiment among men worsened.Meanwhile, people expect to spend […]

Behold a green failure so colossal even Via Meadia is surprised: a UN carbon-credit trading program intended to reduce global concentrations of greenhouse gases has instead led a handful of factories in the developing world to massively increase them.The NYT explains: Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more […]