“All political lives end in failure,” said Enoch Powell, but few fail as comprehensively as Silvio Berlusconi.  He leaves office with his personal reputation in a shambles; bunga bunga parties at which septuagenarians courted the favor of under-aged prostitutes will be the most vivid image indelibly linked to his name.  Criminal and civil court actions […]

A typical US household headed by a person over the age of 65 is 47 times wealthier than a typical household headed by someone under the age of 35. 47 times. Politico has the story: The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 years or older was $170,494, up 42 percent from 1984. Meanwhile, […]

After the dramatic rightward shift in 2010 swept a wave of Republican governors and legislators into office, the country has seen a flurry of new conservative initiatives. One year later, the voters have spoken again: in Arizona, Mississippi and most importantly in Ohio they are saying too much, too extreme, too fast. The New York […]

[Updated version]$92.8 million. That’s the size of the penalty handed down yesterday to convicted hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. The NYT reports: Combined with the fines and forfeitures ordered last month when he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading, Mr. Rajaratnam will be paying a total of $156.6 million…Mr. Rajaratnam’s lawyers […]

The Roman Catholic Church has had difficulties with modernity for a long time. In 1861 Pope Pius IX (famous for his Syllabus of Errors, an exhaustive compendium of modern heresies) made matters very clear in a famous “allocution”, which rejected the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to […]

A lot of the world spends its time oscillating between the gleeful anticipation of American decline and the detailed analysis of those endlessly clever American plots that keep the inevitable, surely approaching decline at bay.  The rise of new powers like China and Brazil has been supporting the decline school of late, but sooner rather […]

The bloodbath in Syria continues as the Assad regime tramples on its agreement with the Arab League. The Washington Post reports: Syrian troops on Monday routed government opponents in a neighborhood of Homs that had emerged in recent weeks as a center of armed resistance to the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad, dealing what […]

Governments in Greece, Italy and Spain are falling as the upheaval in markets spreads to the palaces and parliaments of Club Med.  But as has been the case throughout the long running euro drama, markets are moving faster than politics.  Even as Prime Minister Berlusconi announced his impending resignation, the yields on Italian bonds rose […]

According to the Wall Street Journal, the rising cost of a college education and the impact of the recession is causing even wealthy, affluent students to consider state and local schools over their more prestigious and expensive competition. Mr. Schwartz, 18 years old, was accepted at Cornell University but enrolled instead at City University of […]

Misha Glenny has an important piece in the FT that puts the Greek mess in more of a historical context and assigns much of the blame for Greece’s financial problems on oligarchs, business conglomerates, cheats, and criminals.  A handful of wealthy families control the commanding heights of the Greek economy, he argues, and many of […]