Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has a wide-ranging piece in the New York Times addressing the problem of income inequality in America, arguing that the U.S. is actually falling behind the rest of the developing world when it comes to social mobility. The piece touches on many issues, but the most interesting parts to us […]

Egypt is running out of dollars. The political turmoil following the revolution caused investors to flee and slowed tourism to a halt. As Egyptians scramble to exchange their weakening pounds for dollars, “foreign exchange offices can only supply 20 percent of the dollars for which they receive orders,” Reuters reports.Egyptian officials are remaining hopeful: Essam […]

Self-insurance is the latest loophole that could implode Obamacare. The news comes courtesy of the New York Times, which was a strong supporter of the measure when it was working its way through Congress but has lately devoted much of its coverage to the law’s numerous problems.The practice of self-insurance, whereby companies assume the financial risk for their employee’s health care costs, […]

The West Africa theater in the War on Terror that we aren’t fighting heated up again yesterday as gunmen in northern Nigeria kidnapped and killed foreign workers at a construction site. Perhaps they couldn’t find any polio vaccine workers to kill and so did the next best thing. In any case, Nigeria’s ineffective government looks […]

Voters in troubled Cyprus are turning their backs decisively on the communists. In the first round of presidential elections on Sunday, the incumbent communist AKEL Party made an extremely poor showing, while the candidate of the center-right won nearly 50 percent of the vote. A run-off election will still be needed to determine the final […]

A “miracle village” in India is harvesting world-record yields of potatoes and rice, and its success is drawing the attention of development experts and the scrutiny of scientists. The villagers credit a planting process called “System of Root Intensification” (SRI): Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, […]

The pound is falling as investors desert the sceptered isle. Is it time for Americans to move in? The Financial Times reports: Hedge funds and investment managers are dumping sterling as disappointing economic growth in the UK, the threat of a downgrade of its debt and an upcoming change of guard at the Bank of England have […]

Eighty-four Shiites were murdered by evil fanatics in Quetta, Pakistan, last week, and, sadly, this kind of thing isn’t really news anymore. There are so many murdering fanatics on the loose, and the government is so utterly unable—or, as many mutter darkly, unwilling—to deal with the problem that it is essentially open season on anyone […]

“Where are the customers? Where is their money?” a Wal-Mart executive emailed after a dismal January. As February dragged on, another chimed in: “In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, Wal-Mart’s vice president of finance and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail […]

Public pension funds in the U.S. are not only among the worst managed in the country—they are some of the worst-managed in the world. A recent paper found that U.S. public pension funds routinely take higher risks than pension funds in other countries or private-sector pension funds in America. And unlike their international and corporate […]