Saudi Arabia’s budget has grown by 58 percent since the Arab Spring, with massive welfare and public spending driving the growth.Even as popular uprisings rocked neighboring Bahrain and Oman and toppled an ally in Egypt, the richest gulf monarchy remained unscathed. But rising housing and food prices, youth unemployment, and other expensive problems are forcing […]

Since its financial crisis began, Spain has been having trouble finding buyers for its increasingly risky government bonds. It thought it had found the perfect solution to this problem: tapping its own Social Security Reserve Fund as a buyer of last resort. But there’s one small catch. As the Wall Street Journal reports, with 90 percent of the […]

The Financial Times has some good news for the Eurozone: the ratings group Fitch announced that U.S. banks have increased their exposure to the EU for the fifth straight month as of last November, with investment up by 8 percent month-over-month. German banks were the greatest beneficiaries, but even French borrowers got some love. So things […]

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times, I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended: The country […]

We at Via Meadia believe that telecommuting will play an important role in the new information economy, reducing outmoded commuting practices along with greenhouse gas emissions. But not everyone is so sure. Evgeny Morozov, writing in Slate, argues that telecommuting makes it hard to manage employee productivity and sucks up people’s free time by expanding the number […]

Connections between the adult Jesus, his childhood and the family in which he was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t offer much; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. […]

They’re at it again. David Cameron and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the loud and proud leaders of the UK and Argentina, resumed their diplomatic brawl over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.In a letter penned for the Guardian, Kirchner claimed that today is the 180th anniversary of Britain’s “theft” of the islands from Argentina. She […]

The wind power industry just dodged a bullet. As part of the fiscal cliff deal, Congress has renewed the wind power tax credit, whose expiration could have caused the industry to shrink by 95 percent. Prior to the deal, uncertainty over the industry’s future lead many wind power companies to slow down or halt their […]

Every week brings new evidence of the unexpected greening of America. According to the Wall Street Journal, electricity use is falling in America even as our use of gadgets is on the rise: The Energy Information Administration is projecting that electricity use in the U.S. will rise an average of just 0.6% a year for […]

Our friends at the FT have brought us some good news for the new year: The private sector added more than 200,000 jobs in December, growing at a ten-month high, according to a monthly report by ADP. Even better, the number of job losses has fallen by more than 40 percent since November, nearing pre-recession levels: […]