Some people just don’t seem to understand how pensions work. Some of those people appear to have been running Detroit’s pension system for decades.In a report due today, Detroit’s auditor general and inspector general allege that the city pension has been making excess payments—things like bonuses to retirees and cash to families of workers who died before […]

America’s pension crisis is ugly, but it could be worse: consider China. The Chinese public is in an uproar over new academic research on pensions arguing among other things that the retirement age should be raised from 50 and 60 (for males and females, respectively) to 65.The problems this would address are all too real. Market Watch runs […]

To its credit, the Obama administration has at least recognized that the country is facing a massive student debt crisis. Unfortunately, most of its attempts to address the problem have missed the mark, and many are actually making things worse. Now the administration is trotting out a new plan: sending emails to people about to […]

The Department of Health and Human Services have just released the premium rates for all the federally run health care exchanges that will go live on October 1st in 36 states. It’s the single biggest info dump on ACA rates we’ve seen yet. What do these rates tell us? As per usual, they came with […]

Gazprom is proving for the umpteenth time that it’s willing to go to the mat with its natural gas customers. This time it’s Lithuania that is feeling the displeasure of Russia’s state-owned gas company, as Gazprom announced on Monday its intention to move forward with a plan to build a liquified natural gas (LNG) import […]

Indian PM Manmohan Singh confirmed today that he will be meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in the coming days. While both Indian and Pakistani peace activists will be happy to see a handshake and talks between the two leaders, […]

Angela Merkel and the CDU may have won the German election in a landslide, but due to the peculiarities of the German parliamentary system she still has more work ahead before she can get down to governing. With no other right-of-center parties in the Bundestag, she is left with the unappealing alternatives of forming a “grand” collation […]

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have some good news for America: the most productive areas of the Barnett shale formation have even more gas to give than previously thought. This report comes on the heels of a study conducted earlier this year by the same group (UT-Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology). That study […]

Despite all the talk of US withdrawal from world problems, last weekend’s terror attack in Kenya appears to be boosting chances that US engagement in Africa will grow: U.S. officials on Tuesday were shipping law-enforcement equipment to local police in Nairobi, two U.S. officials said. Both said they expected Kenya to formalize more-specific requests for […]

Here’s a news story Hillary Clinton won’t enjoy reading: the liberal wing of the Democratic party is getting increasingly vocal, angling to push Democratic politicians further to the left on a wide range of areas. WSJ: Strong pushback from Democrats in Congress this month threatened to derail the president’s planned military strike on Syria and […]