Thanks to Obama’s famed “no drama” coolness, it’s hard to detect when he’s breaking a sweat. But if you look at the substance of his actions, it’s clear the President is losing his famed poise, at least as far as Snowden and the surveillance state revelations are concerned.
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
Read more...Reader Cathryn Mataga complained yesterday in comments about the under-reporting of how bad things are out in the real world where most people live. It’s not hard to find proof of her thesis.
Read more...Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the New York Times has an important account of how a system created by banks to catch scam artists like check-kiters has morphed over 20 years into a shadow credit reporting system.
Read more...Obama needed a visual to show that, no, really, truly, jobs really are being created somewhere in America for yet another one of his exercises in trying to pretend that he’s on the side of ordinary Americans. So Obama used as his backdrop an American success story, Amazon, which is opening a new a warehouse in Chattanooga and hiring 7,000 people. That choice tells you everything about what Obama’s “middle class” program is really about.
Read more...Data out of Europe is showing relative improvement on several important fronts, but is this merely stabilization or “less bad” as opposed to finally turning a corner?
Read more...The sad fact of the matter is that Detroit suffers today from international trade and international financial policies of the past two decades that many leading international economists embraced.
Read more...The saga of Harvard Management Company’s relationship with its lead law firm, Ropes & Gray, is a cautionary tale for those who like to believe that private equity investors are doing a good job of taking care of their interests. Just follow the money.
Read more...Moral sentimentalism rules the ethical landscape. For radical change, the Left should take morality back.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis provided the English translation of a new interview with James Galbraith published in Suddeutsche Zeitung. Galbraith focuses on institutional arrangements, the need for restructuring and reform, and constraints on growth.
Read more...Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.
Read more...Only now that the narrative around Detroit is pretty well established – city in long-term decline whose distress was intensified by a series of corrupt city governments, compounded by state governments that were opposed to Detroit’s interests – does an important additional factor come to light, that of derivatives losses.
Read more...The Fukushima nuclear plant crisis continues unresolved in a bad way.
Read more...
