Yves here. The writing is delicious. But one thing that is frustrating (and of course quite deliberate) in reading the Western media account of the standoff in Ukraine is that they airbrush out how the West stoked this conflict and can hardly be surprised that Putin finally felt compelled to respond.
Read more...Yves here. It’s remarkable how much of London has turned into a ghost town thanks to the influx of serious foreign money. When I worked for a few months in London, in 1984, it was Mayfair that was the destination for Saudi money, and it clearly had far too little in the way of street […]
Read more...How we learned to stop worrying and love the IMF….
Read more...The Sochi Olympics were the great success Russia hoped for.
Read more...Yesterday, we put up a post on the subject of who won and lost as a result of Obama being cornered into taking up a Russian proposal to destroy Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons rather than launch punitive attacks. A Beltway insider weighted in via e-mail with some pointed remarks:
Read more...By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen Sure, this is an economics blog, but the story of the week is unquestionably the imminent Congressional vote on authorization for so-called “limited” military strikes on Syria. And there are a variety of significant economic […]
Read more...I’ve been gobsmacked to see that not only is Larry Summers on various short lists of candidates to become the next Fed chairman, but that Summers is also supposedly closing in on the favorite, Janet Yellen.
Read more...It may seem a bit presumptuous to question how Edward Snowden has conducted his affairs so far. After all, he is still alive and not in the tender care of the so-called American justice system, despite having crossed the surveillance arm of the world’s only superpower and fomenting multiple diplomatic uproars. And the political part of Snowden’s project seems to be going as well as he could have hoped.
But it isn’t clear Snowden has been as adept in his personal affairs of late. His press conference in Russia may have made a tenuous situation worse.
Read more...If oil and gas is a profoundly dynamic phenomenon, then so too must be environmental risk and conflicts over natural resources—and we are not getting the full picture from the mainstream media, according to Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, TomDispatch blogger, and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books, 2008). As risk multiply, conventional sources evaporate and we are left with “extreme” energy, renewables may be the only way to avoid war and disaster.
Read more...The status of the US dollar as the world reserve currency gives the US tremendous advantages. Among them: it allows the Fed to export inflation, while the Federal Government can run a huge deficit with impunity. But now an angry Russia has had enough!
Read more...More about a possible link between bankrupt Irish ex-billionaire Sean Quinn’s asset hiding activities and the Taylor family’s company registration businesses (GT Group and successors)
Read more...Is there a connection between New Zealand’s Ian Taylor and Sean Quinn, Ireland’s asset-hiding bankrupt? Could be…
Read more...In my last post on the attempts to clamp down on New Zealander Ian Taylor’s buccaneering (ahem) company registrations, which have facilitated arms-smuggling and massive moneylaundering, I wrote of his latest venture
Read more...Naturally, various official and unofficial sleuths will now be sniffing after this new firm and the “reputable Asian jurisdiction”…
One awaits the next grisly sightings of Taylor’s legacy, registered in “Asia”, or Delaware, or London, or wherever.
It appears that New Zealand’s company incorporation regime has soiled itself, lavishly, again. This time, the Russian mafia appear to be involved.
Read more...There is so much crookedeness among our elites that it’s hard to know, absent more systematic study, whether Harvard is playing a leading role in this decline.
However, the glaring gap between Harvard president Drew Faust’s talk on ethics and her recent actions has stuck with me and I’ve concluded it merits discussion.
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