The indispensable Joel Kotkin has a great essay over at New Geography on how Los Angeles lost its mojo.  Why?  According to Kotkin, A big reason is a decline in the power and mettle of the city’s once-vibrant business community. Between the late 1980s and the end of the millennium, many of L.A.’s largest and most influential […]

Brazilians are choosing to vacation in Miami over places like New York, London, and Paris, says the FT. They are riding high on the strength of the real and Miami has “dirt cheap shopping”. Says Flávia from Rio de Janeiro, “I love Miami. In Rio we have Copacabana, but Miami has Banana Republic”.The commodities boom in […]

A recent Gallup poll reports that confidence in the nation’s public schools has fallen to a low of 34 percent, almost a record. More striking: confidence is lowest in the blue-state educational utopias on the coasts and highest in the South.  No doubt blue partisans will argue that Southern yahoos are satisfied with their pathetic […]

The US Senate condemns Russia’s “occupation” of Georgian territory; Prime Minister Putin calls the US an economic “parasite“, one of the Soviet Union’s ultimate terms of abuse. The US bans Russian officials from visiting the US over alleged human rights violations; Russia threatens the US with global opposition to its policies — especially over Iran.So […]

The bell that tolled for the steelworkers now tolleth for thee. HSBC is cutting 30,000 jobs mostly in Europe and North America as it expands elsewhere.From the Financial Times: HSBC is planning to hire up to 15,000 people in fast-growing markets in Asia and Latin America over the next three years even after confirmation of […]

American democracy enthusiasts have never grasped the class issues in the Egyptian Revolution.  The pro-democracy activists and twitterati who led the street protests looked to us like admirable freedom loving liberals.To many ordinary Egyptians they look like yuppie scum: westernized, privileged preppies whose fathers made enough money by collaborating with the old regime to send […]

Via Meadia has avoided the media frenzy over the debt talks.  Our central forecast has been and remains that there would most likely be an agreement, but that it wouldn’t do much for either the deficit or the economy.  That forecast appears to be on track.The response to yesterday’s deal across financial markets parallels the […]

Wal-Mart has hitched its wagon to the local food train, but not to save the planet. It’s the money.  As Darrin Robbins, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for produce told the Wall Street Journal: “We can get chili peppers from Florida all day long, but at the end of the day that is not necessarily the best model […]

Millions of people in India and Pakistan are victims of a modern form of slavery known as bonded labor or peshgi. As Dawood Ahmed writes in The Express Tribune, Pakistan and India remain amazingly ineffective at cracking down on bonded labor. Despite over a million laborers being enslaved in Pakistan’s brick kiln industry alone, As at […]

Since the Brezhnev era, Russia has been skimping on maintenance. Factories, highways, bridges, rail networks, schools, hospitals: Russians have been trying to keep them running rather than investing money they don’t have to maintain, upgrade and replace them.Corruption, low salaries and the general malaise of post-Soviet Russia make things worse.  Russia has been running on […]