The bell that tolled for the steelworkers now tolleth for thee. HSBC is cutting 30,000 jobs mostly in Europe and North America as it expands elsewhere.From the Financial Times: HSBC is planning to hire up to 15,000 people in fast-growing markets in Asia and Latin America over the next three years even after confirmation of […]

American democracy enthusiasts have never grasped the class issues in the Egyptian Revolution.  The pro-democracy activists and twitterati who led the street protests looked to us like admirable freedom loving liberals.To many ordinary Egyptians they look like yuppie scum: westernized, privileged preppies whose fathers made enough money by collaborating with the old regime to send […]

Via Meadia has avoided the media frenzy over the debt talks.  Our central forecast has been and remains that there would most likely be an agreement, but that it wouldn’t do much for either the deficit or the economy.  That forecast appears to be on track.The response to yesterday’s deal across financial markets parallels the […]

Wal-Mart has hitched its wagon to the local food train, but not to save the planet. It’s the money.  As Darrin Robbins, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for produce told the Wall Street Journal: “We can get chili peppers from Florida all day long, but at the end of the day that is not necessarily the best model […]

Millions of people in India and Pakistan are victims of a modern form of slavery known as bonded labor or peshgi. As Dawood Ahmed writes in The Express Tribune, Pakistan and India remain amazingly ineffective at cracking down on bonded labor. Despite over a million laborers being enslaved in Pakistan’s brick kiln industry alone, As at […]

Since the Brezhnev era, Russia has been skimping on maintenance. Factories, highways, bridges, rail networks, schools, hospitals: Russians have been trying to keep them running rather than investing money they don’t have to maintain, upgrade and replace them.Corruption, low salaries and the general malaise of post-Soviet Russia make things worse.  Russia has been running on […]

The international media and some analysts in Israel are quick to say that recent protests signal the increasing influence of the long-dormant Israeli left and the arrival of the Arab Spring in Israel. Not quite, I’m afraid.A revival of the Israeli left would make President Obama’s life easier: Labor governments are usually more willing to […]

The Aspiring Chief Anklebiter has cancer, and his allies and enemies alike are pondering the future of Venezuela without him. Says the Washington Post: Chavez has not groomed a successor or built institutions that can manage a transition. He has concentrated all power in his hands, providing a focus for the opposition and leaving no space for […]

Huffington Post published an article about college students who use  ‘Sugar Daddies’ in order to pay off their college debt. There’s even a website to facilitate intergenerational hookups. The deeply untrustworthy sources for the story claim that 35% of the site’s 800,000 members identify themselves as students. Those who enter an .edu email address to […]

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy”, said Amartya Sen in 1999.Sen needs a quick trip to Kenya, where the worst drought in sixty years has forced people to survive on wild fruits and food aid.Or perhaps the theory was that two countries with famines will […]