64 years after independence, India’s prospects look suddenly shaky, and uncertainty and confusion faced Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as he gave his Independence Day speech in India today. .  Opposition leaders attacked the speech as revealing the helplessness of the government in addressing corruption scandals and other serious problems facing the country. From the FT: The […]

George Soros describes how the euro can be saved in today’s FT: 1. Reform and recapitalisation of the banking system…Banks’ equity capital levels need to be greatly increased. If an agency is to guarantee banks’ solvency, it must oversee them too. A powerful European banking agency could end the incestuous relationship between banks and regulators, […]

As I’ve written, Assad’s core calculation is that he can crush domestic opponents city by city without triggering foreign intervention.  The US is out of the picture and the Security Council is unlikely to act, given Russian and Chinese anger at the shameless way NATO stretched the Libya authorization from a humanitarian rescue to intervention […]

First rogue journalists, now this? Chinese protesters in the coastal city of Dalian have successfully lobbied the local government to close a chemical plant that manufactured carcinogenic products. Is the Chinese government going soft?Unlikely. The government reportedly already had plans to shutter the plant before local citizens took to the streets, and the security response to […]

In the old days when times got tough, cash hungry rulers went for the monks.  Henry VIII closed the monasteries and sold off the property to his followers.  The French Revolution did the same.These days, the church doesn’t have the dough — and if it did, class action lawyers for sex abuse victims get there […]

World Bank president Robert Zoellick warns that a new recession is likely if world leaders don’t act fast. Unless the economic leadership gets ahead of the problem in its different dimensions, you’ll see the lack of confidence…spread.We are entering a “new danger zone”, he said. What we need is cooperation. This sentiment is echoed in […]

At Via Meadia I’ve argued that the Assad regime has a clear strategic plan: use what you’ve got to get what you need and forget the rest.Operationally that translates into using the (limited) forces staunchly loyal to the regime to crush the opposition one city at a time.  If the domestic opposition can’t overthrow the […]

News reports from Germany this morning suggest that faced with the stark alternatives of a breakdown in the eurozone and the flotation of “eurobonds”, euro-denominated bonds that would be jointly backed by all of the members of the zone, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are slowly and reluctantly edging toward some form of “transfer union” in […]

The fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall has brought out the red in a handful of Germans nostalgic for the good old days when people trying to flee the East German dictatorship were shot down like dogs and left to bleed to death.  Some Left Party delegates refused to observe a minute […]

San Francisco is the epitome of blue America — a city where to be a liberal is to be center right.  These days, it’s a city with a pension crisis: promising too much to city employees and paying too little into the pension fund for years leaves the city of San Francisco with a gaping […]