Puerto Rico’s debt crisis has just been moved up to DEFCON 1. The WSJ reports that a number of financial firms are taking the radical step of limiting investor access to the island’s debt and warning smaller brokers to stay away. As the Journal notes, this is an extreme measure that is rarely ever used. The fact that […]

President Putin’s point man for bringing Ukraine to heel is really yanking on the choke chain these days, threatening to support the dismemberment of Russia’s neighbor if it votes to move closer to the EU. The Times of London has the eyebrow-raising scoop: Sergei Glazyev, one of Vladimir Putin’s top advisers, said that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority might […]

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a letter to the editor extolling the virtues of telework, as well as a host of responses it prompted. Many readers chimed in with positive anecdotes, but there was also plenty of criticism. One reader made a well-worn managerial complaint: [I]t’s difficult for an employer to ascertain the productivity […]

Government rationing, price controls, and seizures of private companies have made Venezuela’s economy the envy of the world, which is why no one’s concerned about the government takeover of a toilet paper factory. The Venezuelan National Guard has occupied the factory, of course, simply to keep “unscrupulous traders” from perpetuating the country’s chronic TP shortage. […]

The EPA unfurled a new rule last Friday limiting emissions at new American coal plants to just 60 percent of what they currently spout. E&E News reports: The rule would limit new coal plants to emitting 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. A typical coal plant today emits 1,800 pounds of CO2 per MWh. New gas […]

Will public-sector pensions follow their private-sector counterparts into relative obscurity? Robert Lowenstein raises this question in a new piece at the Wall Street Journal, drawing parallels between the growth and decline of pensions in private companies in the mid-20th century with the pension crisis currently afflicting cities like Detroit and Stockton. The problems are best illustrated […]

Here are three facts about the Lone Star State, as reported by Policymic. Texas is creating more jobs than any other state in the country; the government sector has shrunk more than any other sector; and perhaps most impressive of all, unemployment is falling even though participation in the labor force is growing: Since August 2012, Texas’ employers […]

I said in a recent post that juxtaposition can sometimes qualify as serendipity. It’s now just happened again.Last week I got a letter from my doctor of the past dozen years informing me that he was changing his practice’s modus operandi.  He’s joining some new group that offers direct email and telephone access to patients, […]

The New York Times has some good news and some bad news for Obamacare. The good news is that, as many had predicted, health insurance costs will indeed be lower than initially projected (although this does not mean that they will be lower than they are now). The bad news is that many insurers are achieving this […]

The French are calling President Obama Carteresque—and they don’t mean it as a compliment: Carter was a somewhat bland engineer, whereas Obama is a charismatic lawyer. Yet they seem to share a fundamental indecisiveness in their approach to world affairs. Carter had difficulty choosing between the muscular line of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, […]