The world’s eyes are riveted on the car crash in Europe, but the troubles in China could be even larger.  An IMF report out this week adds yet another voice to the chorus warning that some very important pieces of China’s boom rest on shaky foundations.  As the NYT reports: In the 125-page report on […]

As was widely reported by the media both in Britain and in this country, on October 15, 2011 Occupy London (the British imitator of the Occupy Wall Street movement) put up a protest camp in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. With more than two hundred tents in place, the camp impeded the regular activities of […]

“Talkin’ about my generation”: the Who song once expressed the hope and self confidence of the Baby Boomers as they reached biological if not emotional maturity.  It was an attack on the older generation, a defense of the young, but it includes an ominous refrain: “Hope I die before I get old.”  Already, perhaps, the […]

The Roman Catholic Church has had difficulties with modernity for a long time. In 1861 Pope Pius IX (famous for his Syllabus of Errors, an exhaustive compendium of modern heresies) made matters very clear in a famous “allocution”, which rejected the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to […]

The scariest thing in the world has nothing to do with Greek debt plans, Italian bond yields or even American pension funds.  It is not the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf over the Iranian nuclear program. The scariest thing in the world is the prospect that the identity wars are spreading from Europe […]

New Yorkers are getting an uncomfortable look at the ugly realities behind what we like to think of as the country’s bluest, most European and most enlightened city.  A series of trials now underway in the Bronx reveal the harsh truth of embedded corruption and contempt for the public at the heart (if that is […]

A word of warning to financial criminals: you are risking more than your own freedom — the health and well-being of your family may be in jeopardy as well. A 60 Minutes special on CBS paints a harrowing picture of the pain and shame endured by the Madoff family in the years following the unveiling […]

We are awash in movements. The Arab Spring is one long series of movements, like a row of candles, each one igniting the next one in the row—Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, then back to Benghazi, and so on across the Middle East. Even Israel has caught a spark, as protesters camped out on Dizengoff Boulevard in […]

A tiny tax on tea destroyed the first British empire by driving the 13 colonies into revolt; will a tiny little tax on financial transactions split the European Union? The Tobin tax (first proposed by economist James Tobin in 1972) is a small tax that would be levied on all financial transactions and would, proponents […]

How America's cheap money addiction is inflating the next bubble and undermining faith in government.