Europe’s unending petitions for a big-check Chinese bailout are beginning to sound like a broken record. The FT covers its latest iteration: Europe’s courtship of Beijing is moving to a more intense level. Klaus Regling, the chief of the eurozone bail-out fund, is in Beijing discussing possible support. Just a few days ago French President […]

Auditing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is like draining the septic tank: it needs to be done, but you won’t like what you find.  The WaPo reports that HUD just added another scandal to a forty-six year tradition: At a joint housing and oversight hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, the […]

Looking at the contrast between events in the financial world these days and the efforts of the Democrats to brand themselves as born-again populists reminds me of the Hillaire Belloc poem: The accursed power which stands on Privilege (And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge) Broke and Democracy resumed her reign: (Which goes with […]

Foreign Policy has a good piece on Iran-Turkey relations. In the article, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a professor at GW, gives detail and substance to a line of analysis that we have suggested on Via Meadia and shows how Turkey’s rise to regional leadership has sidelined Tehran. Writes Prof. Tabaar, Tehran initially viewed the rise of […]

California’s proposed high speed rail system linking the north to the south is going to cost nearly $100 billion, according to a new estimate that figures the cost at three times as high as the original projection approved by California voters. The railroad also won’t be operational until 2034. The Christian Science Monitor has the […]

Good news from Pakistan has been hard to come by over the past few years, but perhaps that is finally beginning to change. Although it will not end the decades-long nuclear standoff between the two countries, Pakistan’s decision to grant Most Favored Nation status to India is a small, symbolic but possibly significant step away […]

It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast than the pomp and ceremony surrounding the G-20 summit of world ‘leaders’ in the posh resort of Cannes with the turmoil and darkness of the world’s economic outlook.  But China, the US and many others are not onlookers in the European crisis; every major economy in the world […]

Is there something about the word ‘green’ that makes people go weak in the head?Rivaled only by the ‘get tough on Netanyahu’ fiasco and the Gunwalker scandal, the ‘Green Jobs’ meltdown is the most comprehensive and conspicuous policy failure of the Obama administration to date.  What three months ago was widely hailed by the establishment […]

Legalizing drugs isn’t making people use them less.  The WSJ reports that about four times as many people die from using prescription painkillers as did ten years ago: About 14,800 people died in the U.S. from overdoses of painkillers in 2008, up from 4,000 deaths in 1999, while the number of these drugs sold quadrupled, […]

Having spent months warning readers about the incompetence of Europe’s political leadership and the incoherence of its institutional structures, I thought I had seen the worst.  But for even this hardened and cynical observer who has had years of watching European ineptitude the last 24 hours have been a revelation: the Europeans are totally at […]