The Fed discovers chicanery: James Saft … Acknowledging that sometimes banks chisel clients and bank employees chisel banks may sound obvious to you, but for the Federal Reserve this is a pretty big step forward. Jeremy Stein, a member of the Board of Governors of the Fed, gave a speech last week in which he said that sometimes it may be necessary for the fed to raise interest rates to contr...Read More

Rebuilding our economic backbone … We're getting beat by Estonia. Not that there's anything wrong with the tiny state on the Baltic Sea. But the nation that built the Hoover Dam, pioneered the Interstate Highway System and created the best aviation system in the world, is rapidly sliding toward the bottom of the list when it comes to infrastructure. Infrastructure is the economic bac...Read More

WikiLeaks is a Rare Truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is Shameful … WikiLeaks is a rare example of a newsgathering organisation that exposes the truth. Julian Assange is by no means alone. Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the...Read More

If you're making long term bets with billions of dollars even your worst-case forecast has to be pretty positive.And if you're talking spades of money and eye-watering lead times few things come close to building an iron mine from scratch.Sandy Chim, CEO of Century Iron Mines, is making exactly these bets with a greenfield project in the Labrador Trough.The iron ore business is all about China.I...Read More

As the world's advanced economies grow at half the speed of the pre-crisis years amid persistently high unemployment, governments are turning to a new set of monetary-policy makers who in word — and they hope deed — are more aggressive than their predecessors. A revolution that began with the arrival in November 2011 of Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank now is gathering spe...Read More

Pope Benedict XVI's successor: Church shift to developing world could see first black Pope … Two Africans are among the early contenders to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting the dramatic shift of the Roman Catholic Church to the developing world [including] Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: There is nothing to priestly prophecies regarding th...Read More

White House Must Respond to Petition Seeking Swartz Prosecutor's Firing … A whitehouse.gov petition demanding the President Barack Obama administration remove Aaron Swartz's prosecutor in the aftermath of the internet activist's suicide has surpassed 25,000 signatures. That means the Obama administration is obliged to enter the debate over whether authorities — including li...Read More

The birth dearth/empty cradle/baby bust is upon us, threatening consequences just as dire as the overpopulation bomb that Paul Ehrlich predicted would cause mass global starvation in the 1970s. The growing percentage of elderly in the population, the root cause of many of our problems, will soon render the United States economically feeble. This dire prophecy of underpopulation has gradually made...Read More

As the world's advanced economies grow at half the speed of the pre-crisis years amid persistently high unemployment, governments are turning to a new set of monetary-policy makers who in word — and they hope deed — are more aggressive than their predecessors. A revolution that began with the arrival in November 2011 of Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank now is gathering spe...Read More

Pope Benedict XVI's successor: Church shift to developing world could see first black Pope … Two Africans are among the early contenders to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting the dramatic shift of the Roman Catholic Church to the developing world [including] Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: There is nothing to priestly prophecies regarding th...Read More

White House Must Respond to Petition Seeking Swartz Prosecutor's Firing … A whitehouse.gov petition demanding the President Barack Obama administration remove Aaron Swartz's prosecutor in the aftermath of the internet activist's suicide has surpassed 25,000 signatures. That means the Obama administration is obliged to enter the debate over whether authorities — including li...Read More

The birth dearth/empty cradle/baby bust is upon us, threatening consequences just as dire as the overpopulation bomb that Paul Ehrlich predicted would cause mass global starvation in the 1970s. The growing percentage of elderly in the population, the root cause of many of our problems, will soon render the United States economically feeble. This dire prophecy of underpopulation has gradually made...Read More

A breakthrough speech on monetary policy … Wednesday night may have marked the "emperor's new clothes" moment of the Great Recession, in which the world suddenly realizes its rulers are suffering from a delusion that doesn't have to be humored … That such economic fatalism is nonsensical is the key message of a truly historic speech delivered on Wednesday by Adair Tur...Read More

Rising power Qatar stirs unease among Back to top some Mideast neighbors … In Egypt, Libya and Syria, where Qatar tried to play a role post-Arab Spring, it finds itself blamed for much that has gone wrong on a local level. Close ties to Egypt's new leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood, have alarmed countries like the United Arab Emirates, where the Islamist group is still banned and which in...Read More

Lying liars at Esquire double down, falsely claim they disclosed former Navy SEAL's eligibility for VA benefits; Update: Esquire (finally) acknowledges error … Yesterday, Esquire magazine came out with an article falsely claiming that the former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Ladin was not offered any health care benefits upon leaving the Navy. As Twitchy documented this morning, Esquire&#...Read More

Satellites Reveal Depletion of a Vital Middle East Water Supply … Just in case you needed more reasons to be concerned about the stability of the Middle East, new research using data from NASA's gravity-sensing Grace satellites shows a substantial decline in the volume of groundwater reserves in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins. Data gathered between 2003 and 2009 show the seasonal...Read More

Too Big to Succeed …On December 20, 1994 Mexico's newly installed president Ernesto Zedillo devalued the currency, the peso, by 15%. As a candidate he had said he would "defend the peso like a dog." That day the peso went from 3.47, where it had been for a year, to 3.95 and the trading floors of Wall Street were filled with the sounds of barking dogs … As the crisis conti...Read More

A breakthrough speech on monetary policy … Wednesday night may have marked the "emperor's new clothes" moment of the Great Recession, in which the world suddenly realizes its rulers are suffering from a delusion that doesn't have to be humored … That such economic fatalism is nonsensical is the key message of a truly historic speech delivered on Wednesday by Adair Tur...Read More

Rising power Qatar stirs unease among Back to top some Mideast neighbors … In Egypt, Libya and Syria, where Qatar tried to play a role post-Arab Spring, it finds itself blamed for much that has gone wrong on a local level. Close ties to Egypt's new leaders, the Muslim Brotherhood, have alarmed countries like the United Arab Emirates, where the Islamist group is still banned and which in...Read More

Lying liars at Esquire double down, falsely claim they disclosed former Navy SEAL's eligibility for VA benefits; Update: Esquire (finally) acknowledges error … Yesterday, Esquire magazine came out with an article falsely claiming that the former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Ladin was not offered any health care benefits upon leaving the Navy. As Twitchy documented this morning, Esquire&#...Read More