Visiting the deep water harbor at Cam Ranh Bay, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took another step towards the most important US foreign policy shift since the 1940s as he talked about the importance of access to the prime ports of Asia to America’s emerging grand strategy in the east.Fresh from the announcement of a […]

Regular readers know that while I disagree with George Soros on a number of points, I find him to be one of the keenest observers of world events. And of all the subjects on which George is brilliant, Europe is perhaps his best. Born and raised in Hungary, educated in the UK, and active across […]

John Ellis, one of the country’s shrewdest political analysts, offers a way to score the Wisconsin recall election. Using concepts familiar to Via Meadia readers, Ellis argues that the Wisconsin election is a referendum on the Blue Social Model. Because of this, the election in Wisconsin offers an early clue as to how voters feel […]

For all the talk of de-leveraging in the economic and financial media these days, it looks like at least one group of borrowers is bucking the trend–students. According to the New York Fed’s latest Quarterly Report, released late in the week, while all other forms of debt in the US have fallen by $1.53 trillion since […]

Shale gas might just be the best thing since sliced bread.  In addition to saving the environment and solving poverty, fracking–and the abundance of natural gas it produces–is doing its part to help solve America’s economic woes. While regular Via Meadia readers know that the fracking revolution has been generating good, well-paying jobs in the energy sector and […]

As the British celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s sixty years on the throne, Americans congratulate them and share the celebratory moment. She isn’t, thank goodness, our queen, but she is a symbol of some enduring British qualities and accomplishments that are worth remembering and celebrating at a time like this.This year Queen Elizabeth passes George III […]

It isn’t a “pivot,” was the message of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta yesterday. It’s a “rebalancing.”Whatever it is, it’s big.Panetta used the occasion of a Singapore speech at the (London based) International Institute of Strategic Studies to tell a group of Asian officials about US plans to shift the balance of its naval forces to […]

Last year the US made great strides towards a more equal society: we cut the number of millionaires by more than 100,000. According to a study from the Boston Consulting Group, 129,000 evil US millionaires rejoined the ranks of the proletariat last year as the value of their stocks, cash and other non-business and non-property […]

As world opinion becomes more outraged (and US diplomacy looks more impotent and clueless) on Syria, a poll in France casts light on the growing clamor for yet another Middle Eastern war.According to a poll published by the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde, 58 percent of those polled favored a UN backed intervention in Syria. […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report for May on Friday, and the Obama administration was stunned by the numbers. America added a paltry 69,000 new jobs last month, and the numbers for previous months have been revised downwards by nearly 50,000. As Matt Yglesias notes, this amounts to a net gain […]