More bad news for Boomers watching their retirement portfolios shrink and their home equity dwindle.  If the San Francisco Federal Reserve is right about long term stock market trends in a spinechilling new study, Boomers can expect depressed stock prices for most of the rest of their lives.For decades, the rising American stock market has […]

Classic tactics from Washington: Find a popular program and threaten to kill it if Congress doesn’t fork over some dough. As the Washington Post reports: Federal officials are warning Congress that funding cuts and program delays will create a gap in weather satellite coverage starting in about 2016. That’s when a key polar-orbiting satellite is […]

In Samuel Johnson’s famous poem on London, he described some of its dangers: Here falling houses thunder on your head And here a female atheist talks you dead.In southern California, houses may fall on your head, but the female atheists are doing less talking than looming; apparently a particularly attractive one is going to be […]

The phrase ‘nation building’ conjures up ideas of foreign policy as social work: public health clinics, democracy workshops and so on.  Yes, but the first and foremost requirement of nation building is state building — building a strong government that can enforce the law and suppress armed opposition — and the main task of state […]

Brazil, last seen obsessing over rumors of a US plot to take over the Amazon, has since begun to fight back against real-life invaders. Various observers report that the Brazilian military has gone on the offensive on its own soil this month to push out heavily armed militias controlled by drug cartels that have set […]

With Vice President visiting Japan and the NATO assisted Libyan rebels consolidating (one hopes) their control of Tripoli, this is an odd and impolitic moment to say so, but the decline of the trilateral alliance is picking up speed.Trilateralism was the response of the US and its closest allies to the perceived decline in American […]

As eurozone countries prepare to cough up the necessary funds for Greece’s bailout, the news that just one country — Finland — has struck a side deal with Athens to ensure Greece does not default on Finnish loans threatens to shake up the entire bailout.  The FT reports: The Greco-Finnish collateral deal, reached last week […]

Anti-government protests are springing up in yet another country. This time, Vietnam is the lucky winner. Yet in contrast to the situation in the Arab world, the Vietnamese government isn’t the object of the demonstrators’ ire — at least not to start.The protestors are angry about Chinese expansion into disputed areas of the South China […]

Thanks to this afternoon’s earthquake in northern Virginia, the palatial TAI headquarters building in Washington is being temporarily evacuated.  No one has been injured and there are no signs of structural damage; nevertheless buildings are being evacuated all across the region and we are no exception.Blogging will resume as soon as we can find a […]

Today the Telegraph reports that Chinese officials are scrambling to protect their business interests in Libya after rebel leaders suggested that they could give a cold shoulder to countries that didn’t help the revolution. The Telegraph quotes an official at the Libyan oil firm Agoco as saying “We don’t have a problem with western countries like […]