Raghuram Rajan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and former Chief Economist at the IMF, will be India’s next chief economic advisor, the Wall Street Journal reports.Rajan’s appointment could be good news for India, which is currently in a pessimistic mood—partly due to the monsoon, partly due to the […]

If ever there were a unifying cause in the Middle East, it would be the scramble between America, Israel, and Sunni states in the Persian Gulf to contain an intransigent Iran. The U.S. wants a balance of power in the region, not Iranian hegemony; Israel can’t afford the security risks of such a hegemony; and […]

More bad news from the Golden State: apparently not content with creating what amounts to a free life-insurance policy for state employees, California legislators are considering creating another open-ended budget commitment. This time, the new commitment will go to private-sector workers rather than public employees.SB1234, a new bill currently working its way through the state legislature, aims […]

Not long ago Via Meadia discussed the possibility of an internationalization of the Syria crisis, with Turkey and Iran being the chief belligerents. Events this week are edging closer to a wider Middle East war amid the crumbling wreckage of the Levant:First, on Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan declared his government’s willingness to invade Syria to crush what might […]

Take a look at the latest grim economic data from Europe: Industrial output in Spain dropped for the tenth straight month, and now the German economy appears to be spluttering: German exports, a major source of growth for the country, fell in June for the month, after recovering the previous month from an earlier decline, […]

Americans don’t expect good economic news anytime soon, according to a new poll by Discover Financial Services’ U.S. Spending Monitor: the portion of consumers that expect the economy will get worse rose to more than half for the first time this year–up 4 percentage points at 53%–as sentiment among men worsened.Meanwhile, people expect to spend […]

Behold a green failure so colossal even Via Meadia is surprised: a UN carbon-credit trading program intended to reduce global concentrations of greenhouse gases has instead led a handful of factories in the developing world to massively increase them.The NYT explains: Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more […]

Egypt’s President Morsi, a former Muslim Brother, reacted resolutely to this week’s Sinai attacks, in which 16 Egyptian policemen were killed. As we noted earlier, the Egyptian military attacked unknown targets in Sinai from the air. Shortly thereafter, Morsi fired his intelligence chief, the commander of the military police, the head of the presidential guard, and […]

Trading giant Morgan Stanley is planning to eliminate a number of positions by tapping computers that can make many trading decisions, according to the WSJ: While the effort represents only a part of what the firm is doing to boost low returns in the business, the shift already has reduced the ranks of interest-rate and […]

July was a difficult month for Brazil: a major corruption scandal bolstered the case for supporters of the rule of law and transparency. This was a small bit of good news amid otherwise discouraging economic signs and a round of massive deficit spending that may be storing up trouble for the future.The trying times at home […]