A familiar national battle is heating up in New York state: the debate over tax levels on the wealthy. Like many blue states, New York is a model of income inequality and it has both large numbers of millionaires and billionaires and large, hungry public employee unions.Despite opposition from Governor Cuomo, various interest groups and […]

A story in the FT on an interesting currency fad in China’s property market touches on a much more important subject towards the end of the article: China’s young professionals and their struggle to afford a home. Soaring property prices, along with food inflation, have soured the mood of China’s young and previously politically disinterested […]

Europe has spent the better part of two years grappling with a slow-motion debt crisis, and has had alarmingly little success in doing so. Could the problem be the ineptitude and shortsightedness of continental leadership? Of course not — it must be the fault of the evil rating agencies. The FT reports: Under one of […]

Is Mozambique the next North Dakota?  According to the WSJ, the Italy’s energy giant Eni SpA just made a big find: The company’s first well in a deepwater exploration campaign has found about 15 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to people briefed on the discovery. They said the gas reservoir is of very high […]

The news that Americans now owe more student loan debt than they do on their credit cards is good news from one point of view: better spend money you don’t have on education than on fancy dinners and trips to Las Vegas.  A country that responds to recession and bad times by studying harder and […]

Democracy and business, India style.Mongolia: A very juicy filling in the sandwich between China and Russia, which might lead to commercial issues (like new export routes) and social problems (migrant Chinese workers routinely get beat up on the streets of Ulaanbaatar, and the police aren’t too interested in protecting them).A Pakistani woman told Hilary Clinton at a […]

Despite the bad press it’s getting lately, free trade is a core Anglosphere value and one of the building blocks of a prosperous world order.  In the last twenty years, globaloney swallowing trademeisters have steered the world system into a dead end, and the stalemated Doha Round of trade talks is one consequence.  (The increasing […]

Troubles are mounting for Turkey. Problems with the Kurds have begun to flare up along the border with Iraq just as Ankara has become more involved in the Syrian conflict. Early this week, 24 Turkish policemen and soldiers were killed by Kurdish militants. From the Financial Times: Militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) […]

An interesting new article in Al Jazeera English sheds more light on the lack of change in Egypt. Profiling a marginalized neighborhood on the outskirts of Cairo, it paints a bleak picture of the “democratic revolution” that has supposedly occurred over the past eight months: Egypt’s government is designed for a dictatorship: It is extremely […]

Amid reports that President Hugo Chavez is back in Cuba for further medical tests, the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled that even if Leopoldo López, a popular opposition leader, beats Chavez in next year’s elections, he will not be allowed to take office. His determination to run anyway, and ineligibility should he actually win enough votes, threatens to further […]