Political Economy

A post from Reuters in overnight trading in Asia caught my eye.  It proclaimed “Asia faces up to challenges of global crisis." What I found particularly interesting about the post was the fact that the Asians had set up a $120…

Kate Kelly and Jon Hilsenrath have a story on the front of the Wall Street Journal today demonstrating the real problems with the revolving door between Wall Street and the regulators.  The essence of the story is this:  new York Fed…

This is a pretty cool video from New Scientist.  This team of modelers has come up with a way to model human mobility using data from dollar bill tracking site Where’s George? The result is a model that tracks smaller human movements,…

This comes from Bloomberg. Unfortunately it is pretty scary stuff: The World Health Organization said the first pandemic since 1968 is imminent after an outbreak of swine flu spread to eight nations and 11 U.S. states. The WHO’s…

This is a bombshell from the political world. I believe that means Al Franken will make Obama filibuster-proof. Obviously, this is very bad news for Republicans. I suspect that the deal is that Rendell and Casey will pull out ALL the…

This is a thought experiment, so bear with me. I have written repeatedly how I felt that the U.S. Government's plans to save the banking system were not adequate in the face of a severe capital shortfall in banking. On one level, I…

Marshall Auerback here. Yesterday, Ed made a big to-do about China's increase in gold reserves. I am going to take a different view here. CLSA is saying that the increase is from purification and miscellaneous transactions since all…

George H. W. Bush's National Security Advisor talks with Charlie Rose and Carlos Pascual, Brookings Institute vice president and director of Foreign Policy. They opine on "the Obama Doctrine" as Barack Obama nears his 100-day mark in…

I say no, he needs to get all of this out in the open and behind us.  But the Conservative Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib makes a compelling argument that he should, using Jerry Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon as a reason.  Take a look. …

Former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and former U.S. Secretary of State, George Shultz, reflect on the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall.