Most Americans have never heard of the Dexia Group, a Franco-Belgian financial company that could be the next big turning point in the European debt saga.  Dexia has already been rescued once, as France and Belgium stepped in to provide guarantees and liquidity to keep the troubled group alive.The ever-helpful though not always cheerful FT […]

If true, this is probably the scariest story you’ll read all week: Thousands of homes in Illinois had their water shut off by hackers in Russia. The BBC reports: Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois…The net address through which […]

The most important unrest in today’s world may not be on Tahrir Square or even in Syria.  A growing wave of strikes across China may ultimately say more about where the world is headed than anything in the Middle East.As this piece from the Financial Times reports, export orders are declining and factories across China […]

Those who follow Asian political debates don’t need to be told who Kishore Mahbubani is.  As Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the University of Singapore, Mahbubani is leading the development of an institution that hopes to become one of the world’s leading research and policy centers.  Over a career […]

State and local governments around the country have long underfunded their pension funds, covering the gap between what they have and what they have obliged themselves to pay by making unrealistic assumptions about the rate of return they expect from their investments.Now that the wave of Boomer retirement is starting to hit, the gaps are […]

Almost fifty years ago, when the Mead family migrated to London for a year to investigate life on the far side of the pond, a neighboring family came for Christmas dinner.  They had one of those typically hobbity English last names; call them the Snogdens.  They came in the early afternoon for the lavish midday […]

After a morning of meetings in Washington DC, I am preparing to travel with the Grand Matriarch and the Venerable Mead to the storied home of the Philadelphia Meads for the Thanksgiving vacation.  With two nieces, three nephews and an assortment of siblings, in-laws and others, not to mention an unconscionably large supply of holiday […]

The era of the municipal bankruptcy is now upon us, but we may soon be entering the age of entitlement bankruptcies. An excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal spotlights major financial and administrative problems in Social Security’s disability program: But many of the doctors haven’t practiced outside their specialty in decades, if at all, […]

This is the week in which the parrot stopped pining for the fjords; the British Guardian newspaper has given up hope for a global climate treaty taking effect before 2020.  The worthless and deceptive Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and it will be replaced by… nothing.As the left-leaning, pro-green paper writes despondently: Governments of […]

Egypt so far is one of the Arab countries where the Arab Spring has not led to a revolution; the Mubarak family is gone but Scaf, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, lives on.  Scaf is what Turks would call Egypt’s “deep state” institution, the structure behind the structures of the state, and the armed […]