Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally backed mortgage titans, have cost US taxpayers as much as a small war.  Last summer, the CBO estimated the cost of bailing out the two agencies at $317 billion. Administration proposals to write down principal on troubled mortgages backed by the two agencies could add $100 billion or […]

Something to watch closely: unrest in Saudi’s Eastern Province appears to be heating up.  In two separate incidents in the last 24 hours, two protesters have died from police gunfire.Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province is mostly Shiite in faith; the strict Wahabi imams who shape Saudi religious orthodoxy consider Shiites in some cases to be apostates […]

As Mead followers — both on-line and in print — are aware, culture interacts with economics in mysterious ways, creating complex and complicated situations that often defy simplistic economic explanations or solutions. Over at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle has a story noting that this dynamic might help to explain the decidedly unimpressive recent performance of […]

Democracy has probably seen better days in Africa. Coming on the heels of an ill-advised and fraudulent election in the Congo, Senegal is conducting its own presidential elections on February 26 that have already been plagued by undemocratic developments. Those elections will probably be more organized and better administered than Congo’s—since that’s not hard to […]

It is yet another anticlimax in Athens as yet another austerity deal fails to bridge the gap between Greece and its creditors.Despite the dramatic cuts to government spending negotiated by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and Socialist Party leader George Papandreou, leaders in Athens and Brussels continued to lock horns over the debt crisis. Mere hours […]

This isn’t the kind of news we like to receive at the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens: US gasoline consumption, in the words of blogger Charles Hugh Smith, has “fallen off a cliff.”This is bad news: as Smith points out, deliveries of gasoline to retail outlets track very closely with recessions going back thirty […]

The President of Sri Lanka and the Prime Minister of Pakistan held cordial meetings in Islamabad and talked about deepening their cooperation based on common views about regional issues.India will not be amused.Sri Lanka and Pakistan both have reasons to worry about India’s regional aspirations; both countries enjoy good relations with China. India worries, not […]

Has the Israeli-Palestinian peace process passed its sell-by date? Writing in Ha’aretz, Israel’s liberal daily, center-left columnist Ari Shavit eulogizes the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: [T]he old peace is dead. Really dead. The Islamic revolution in Egypt has removed the southern anchor of that promised peace. The murderous oppression in Syria has neutralized its northern guarantor, […]

A WaPo story points to the cancer eating away at Egypt’s slender chances for a happy democratic transition: the people want bread and it isn’t clear how they will get it.As the WaPo points out, Egypt depends on imports to feed its people.  The Nile isn’t enough anymore; 80 percent of its food comes from […]

The greens that form a key part of President Obama’s base have gotten him in a lot of trouble lately. The president experienced the first major scandal of his “scandal-free” White House due to unwise and ill-considered government loans to a green energy company that wasn’t ready for prime time, and his decision to nix […]