There are currently ten states whose pension liabilities are higher than total yearly revenues, according to a new Moody’s report on public pensions. The states in question included Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Connecticut. Worst of all was Illinois, where pension liabilities are more than twice as high as revenues. As Reuters reports, the culprit is the same […]

A battle raging in France’s “pro-worker” legal system between an American multinational and a French labor union is sure to repel any Americans thinking of investing there in the future. The US tire company Goodyear has a factory in the northern French town of Amiens that is losing $80 million a year; it makes products […]

Burypensions Blog offers some skeptical scrutiny for Detroit’s recent rosy valuation of its Police and Fire Retirement System. The city claims the system is 96.1 percent funded, but the math shows that this may be so much lipstick on a pig. Among the five items Burypensions alleges the city is deliberately concealing: $552,110,000 of that asset amount […]

There are principles, and then there are economic interests—and they don’t always overlap. Germany has been doing its utmost to demonstrate that it has no illusions on this score by lobbying hard to prevent the EU from pushing through a set of lower CO2 emission standards.These new standards would stipulate that companies reduce their fleet-wide CO2 […]

Mohamed ElBaradei, a self-appointed leader of the regime counter-elite during Egypt’s Arab Spring, has just come out with a sharp critique of the Morsi government in Foreign Policy. In the years since Mubarak’s fall, Egypt has fallen to near the bottom of FP‘s Failed States Index, which ElBaradei chalks up to a lack of real reform and uncertainty […]

Far and away the most surprising part of Obama’s climate change speech yesterday was the bit about the Keystone pipeline. The speech was about adapting to and mitigating climate change, and few expected the President to touch on what may be the hottest hot-button green issue going right now—the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would […]

It was Gay Marriage Day in Washington today with two Supreme Court decisions on the issue. In United States v. Windsor, the Court struck down the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. For the purposes of federal law and benefits, legally married same-sex couples will now […]

Seemingly every day brings news about how poorly we understand our climate, and yet global leaders seem more determined than ever to tackle the problem with game plans drawn up using yesterday’s facts. China began rolling out its first carbon cap-and-trade scheme last week, and yesterday President Obama announced a series of executive orders, collectively called […]

Susan Rice gave her last news conference at the UN before starting her new job as National Security Advisor yesterday, calling the West’s inaction in Syria “a moral and strategic disgrace that history will judge harshly.”Susan Rice is well known as an architect of the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, and after the Rwandan genocide she famously […]

Moody’s, the credit rating agency, is setting itself up as an unlikely arbiter of massively open online courseware. A report from Moody’s Investors Service makes bullish predictions for schools that are early adopters of MOOCs, noting that successful programs will allow schools to spread their brand globally, potentially opening them up to a much wider range […]