Every time we think we’ve reached rock bottom in the pension crisis, a new piece of data comes along to let us know there’s still further to fall. As reported by Reuters, a recent Moody’s study contains several disturbing facts: the 61 most populous US cities are together facing a $99 billion shortfall in pension funds, […]

Bill de Blasio’s win in New York City’s mayoral primary has Democratic interest groups rushing to offer their endorsement. Josh Gold, political director of the Hotel Trades Council, said, “It’s time for working people and Democrats to unite behind our next mayor, Bill de Blasio.” An endorsement from the prominent labor group indicates that the […]

The latest in MOOC innovation is a two-part class offered by Coursera on app development. Unlike most MOOCs, however, each part of this sequence is taught by a professor from a different university (University of Maryland and Vanderbilt, respectively).Vanderbilt news: “Creating such an opportunity for Vanderbilt and University of Maryland students alone would be incredibly […]

The UK’s National Health System has been at the center of several PR disasters this year, but new data suggests that the scandals aren’t isolated incidents. The Telegraph reports on new findings that patients in UK hospitals are 45 percent more likely to die than patients in the US, and five times more likely to die from […]

“If the wars of this century were fought over oil,” a vice president of the World Bank famously warned in 1995, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water—unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” Water scarcity and its ability to create domestic unrest and international conflict […]

Here’s a huge blow to the ACA: even now, after the full court publicity press for the Obamacare has started in earnest, public opinion continues to swing against the law. In January, 44 percent of Americans opposed Obamacare and 51 percent supported it. Today, Politico reports that 57 percent oppose and 39 percent favor.At the […]

The bifurcation of Californian society into coastal elites and inland proles is catching the attention of more and more people. Economists at the UCLA Anderson Forecast are warning that California’s slow growth and high unemployment may be part of a structural problem that’s not going away any time soon. The industry on which California’s economy […]

Just how bad of a mess is President Obama in over Syria? So bad that the New York Times is visibly pained by the messy and humiliating situation the Democratic Reagan, the Second Coming of Lincoln and the New FDR finds himself in this week. A sampling of today’s headlines: “A Rare Public View of Obama’s […]

There are a whole host of reasons why China is finding it so devilishly difficult to replicate American shale success. China lacks the water resources, the geology, the roads, the pipelines, the technical know-how, and the wildcatting ecosystem, all of which helped foster the US shale boom. In a round-up of what’s gone wrong with […]

The popular understanding among the chattering classes is that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies—specifically the looming end of loose monetary policy—are at the root of emerging markets’ recent troubles. Daniel Gros has a great contrarian essay up at Project-Syndicate taking issue with this oversimplified view: Quantitative easing in the US cannot have been behind these […]