US ‘creative destruction’ out of steam
In 2008, that business died too, after the market became fully electronic. But today, the Minneapolis exchange is far from dead; this year, its floor was taken over by CoCo, which lets out space to freelancers and small businesses. Among the ghosts of 19th century farmers, there are new companies catering to mobile advertising, iPad apps, business-to-business online networking, and other niches that the old grain traders never imagined.
Click to enlargeCan America regain most dynamic labour market mantle?
By Edward Luce
Last week, Barack Obama went to Osawatomie,
Kansas, to kick off a more populist phase in his 2012 re-election bid.
“This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class,” declared the US
president, who chose the same venue that Teddy Roosevelt used in 1910 to
call for a new progressive era. “I believe that this country succeeds
when everyone gets a fair shot.”
In Part One of the series examining the US jobs crisis, Edward Luce says that fears persist it cannot be fixed
The risk of a Syrian massacre. by Gideon Rachman
I wonder whether that may be too optimistic?
The reports from Syria are certainly alarming. Refugees flooding across the Turkish border. And the citizens of the rebellious town of Jisr al-Shugour, bracing themselves for a full-scale assault by the army.
I think the idea that the Syrian army could not simply kill thousands of their fellow citizens was based on two assumptions – or, perhaps, hopes. First, that in the internet age, it would be impossible to carry out bloody repression on this scale, without immediately provoking a paralysing international outcry. Second, that the development of the international doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” brutalised civilians – even within the boundaries of a sovereign state – would make Assad junior stay his hand.
The reports from Syria are certainly alarming. Refugees flooding across the Turkish border. And the citizens of the rebellious town of Jisr al-Shugour, bracing themselves for a full-scale assault by the army.
I think the idea that the Syrian army could not simply kill thousands of their fellow citizens was based on two assumptions – or, perhaps, hopes. First, that in the internet age, it would be impossible to carry out bloody repression on this scale, without immediately provoking a paralysing international outcry. Second, that the development of the international doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” brutalised civilians – even within the boundaries of a sovereign state – would make Assad junior stay his hand.
Keep taking the testosterone
High T: Lionel Bissoon (above) has seen a rise in demand for testosterone from Wall Street workers.
False dawns and public fury: the 1930s are not so far away
Obama Budget Again Skips Making Hard Choices
On Monday, President Obama is scheduled to release his
proposed budget for the coming year. If his past three budgets are any
indication, it is unlikely anyone outside of the White House will take
this budget seriously.
That's because past Obama budgets have been long on empty promises and short on real solutions. This president has consistently ignored Washington's crushing debt and passed the real costs on to future generations.
The administration has already signaled that this year's spending plan will offer more of the same: a budget that spends too much, borrows too much and taxes too much.
That's because past Obama budgets have been long on empty promises and short on real solutions. This president has consistently ignored Washington's crushing debt and passed the real costs on to future generations.
The administration has already signaled that this year's spending plan will offer more of the same: a budget that spends too much, borrows too much and taxes too much.
The Producers
The decline of marriage and male wages is a problem of equality, not inequality.
By JAMES TARANTO
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has expanded the blog post we criticized Wednesday into a full-length column, and in doing so made explicit a predictable fallacy in his thinking. To review, Krugman's argument is that the sharp decline in marriage rates among less-affluent white Americans, documented by Charles Murray in his new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," is "mainly about money" as opposed to "morals." Here's the meat of Krugman's argument:By STEPHEN MILLER and DOUGLAS BELKIN
Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow
was tragically killed in an automobile accident on Friday. Kelsey
Hubbard spoke to Deputy Managing Editor Mike Miller about the beloved
journalist, whose work touched and inspired millions of people around
the world.
Low Turnout and the Big Tune-Out
Voters aren't bothering with the GOP, but Obama has lost their attention too.
Meet the men the U.S. might release as a goodwill gesture.
Their identities are an open secret, and last week the White House gave a restricted briefing to a few Members of Congress to win their support. The men are among the 46 out of 171 detainees left at Gitmo that an Administration review in 2010 deemed "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution." Two years later, these detainees are evidently no longer too dangerous.
These upstanding citizens are:
• Mohammad Fazl, around age 45, was the senior-most Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan and their deputy defense minister when captured in November 2001. He was at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, outside the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, when hundreds of Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors in the Northern Alliance. CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann died in the melee, becoming the first American casualty of the Afghan war. A confidential annex of the Administration's 2010 review suggests that Fazl may be responsible for Spann's death.
According to his secret 2008 Gitmo file, which was published by WikiLeaks, Fazl also commanded foreign fighters in Afghanistan and "possessed vast power and financial resources."
AFP/Getty Images
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
He was
close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Before 9/11, Fazl commanded
troops in central Afghanistan who massacred hundreds of Hazaras, a
Shiite Muslim ethnic minority. His Gitmo file also says the Iranian
government suspects him of "being connected" to the killing of its
diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.An 'accommodation' that makes the birth-control mandate worse.
So you almost have to admire the absurdity of the new plan President Obama floated yesterday: The government will now write a rule that says the best things in life are "free," including contraception. Thus a political mandate will be compounded by an uneconomic one—in other words, behold the soul of ObamaCare.
AFP/Getty Images
President Obama with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelious announce an adjustment to the health care bill on Friday.
Under the original Health and Human
Services regulation, all religious institutions except for houses of
worship would be required to cover birth control, including hospitals,
schools and charities. Under the new rule, which the White House
stresses is "an accommodation" and not a compromise, nonprofit religious
organizations won't have to directly cover birth control and can opt
out. But the insurers they hire to cover their employees can't opt out.
If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you're a
rational person.THE WORLD NEEDS AMERICA
Foreign-policy pundits increasingly argue that democracy and free markets could thrive without U.S. predominance. If this sounds too good to be true, writes Robert Kagan, that's because it is.
By ROBERT KAGAN
History shows that world orders, including our own, are transient. They rise and fall, and the institutions they erect, the beliefs and "norms" that guide them, the economic systems they support—they rise and fall, too. The downfall of the Roman Empire brought an end not just to Roman rule but to Roman government and law and to an entire economic system stretching from Northern Europe to North Africa. Culture, the arts, even progress in science and technology, were set back for centuries.
Many of us take for granted how the world
looks today. But it might look a lot different without America at the
top. The Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan talks with Washington
bureau chief Jerry Seib about his new book, "The World America Made,"
and whether a U.S. decline is inevitable.
With the outbreak of World War I, the age of settled peace and advancing liberalism—of European civilization approaching its pinnacle—collapsed into an age of hyper-nationalism, despotism and economic calamity. The once-promising spread of democracy and liberalism halted and then reversed course, leaving a handful of outnumbered and besieged democracies living nervously in the shadow of fascist and totalitarian neighbors. The collapse of the British and European orders in the 20th century did not produce a new dark age—though if Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had prevailed, it might have—but the horrific conflict that it produced was, in its own way, just as devastating.
U.S. Navy
If the U.S. is unable to
maintain its hegemony on the high seas, would other nations fill in the
gaps? On board the USS Germantown in the South China Sea, Tuesday.
10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve
What would happen if the Federal Reserve was shut down permanently? That is a question that CNBC asked recently,
but unfortunately most Americans don't really think about the Fed much.
Most Americans are content with believing that the Federal Reserve is
just another stuffy government agency that sets our interest rates and
that is watching out for the best interests of the American people. But
that is not the case at all. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is a
private banking cartel that has been designed to systematically destroy
the value of our currency, drain the wealth of the American public and
enslave the federal government to perpetually expanding debt. During
this election year, the economy is the number one issue that voters are
concerned about. But instead of endlessly blaming both political
parties, the truth is that most of the blame should be placed at the
feet of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has more power over
the performance of the U.S. economy than anyone else does. The Federal
Reserve controls the money supply, the Federal Reserve sets the interest
rates and the Federal Reserve hands out bailouts to the big banks that
absolutely dwarf anything that Congress ever did. If the American
people are ever going to learn what is really going on with our economy,
then it is absolutely imperative that they get educated about the
Federal Reserve.Buying Gold on the Price Inflation Guarantee
By The Mogambo Guru
I don’t know why, exactly, but perhaps they fear me because I am a cynical, paranoid, gold-bug old man who thinks that the Federal Reserve has turned into an evil institution by creating So Freaking Much Money (SFMM), now so that it can commit the sin of monetizing new government debt by the truckload, increasing the money supply and guaranteeing a roaring inflation that hurts the poor, and hurts the almost-poor, and hurts the not-quite-poor, and (now that I think about it) it hurts everybody, which hurts me personally because they come whining to me to give them some of MY money!
The Next American Oil Boom?
By Addison Wiggin
Seriously.
There are not very many people outside the “Peak Oil” crowd who care — heck, even know — what “decline rates” are.
Yet the “story that isn’t being told” is often where you find the best investment narratives.
“At first,” our resident energy enthusiast kicks us off with just such a tale, “the conservative approach was to estimate that the Marcellus wells would be productive for about two-three years and then the decline curve would kick in.
“Now, after three years of testing in some areas, that window is more like five years.”
After five years? Many operators will go back and refrack the wells. Those five-year wells might become 10-year wells.
Why US Job Creation Heats Up in Cold Weather
By Bill Bonner
“No, we don’t want to go through your new x-ray machine,” we told the TSA guard.
“Whassa matter? It’s safe…” she replied.
“How do you know that?”
“The government said it was safe.”
“Do you believe everything the government tells you?”
“Heh…heh… Okay…” then, turning to no one in particular… “REFUSAL on 11. Male.”
We were out quickly…but the poor old woman behind us had to get up out of her wheelchair…hobble through the x-ray machine…and then they still wanted to feel her up on the other side.
You can’t be too safe, right?
Economic Growth in the New Millennium
By Joel Bowman
“Greek Bailout at Risk as Party Pushes Back,” reports Bloomberg.
“Greece Plunged Into Political Turmoil Over Austerity Measures,” chimes The New York Times.
“Greek government hit by resignations,” adds the FT.
We spilled a good deal of virtual ink in yesterday’s issue casting doubt and aspersions over the validity of the Greek bailout plan. The story, we reckoned, was at best an old one…at worst an irrelevant one. Bailout or no bailout, the Greeks are broke. The rest is merely noise.
Curiously (and to their credit), markets yesterday would not be roused to action, neither by rumour, hearsay or scuttlebutt regarding the imminent, 11th hour deals “struck” between Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.
Instead, they held tight, patiently.
US: Charles Manson energy – by Paul Driessen
“…
gleaming white wind turbines generating carbon-free electricity carpet
chaparral-covered ridges and march down into valleys of Joshua trees.”
This is “the future” of American energy – not “the oil rigs planted
helter-skelter in [nearby] citrus groves,” nor the “smoggy San Joaquin
Valley” a few miles away.US: Our Constitution Is The Best Model A Country Could Have – Investors.com
Our
Constitution is no longer respected as it once was. Nations writing new
constitutions don’t see it as the prototype to be followed. All have
something in common with our president.US: Plutocrat Dems attack Romney as ‘Richie Rich’ – by Ann Coulter
Having
given up on pillorying Mitt Romney for plundering his way to vast
wealth — because, unfortunately, it isn’t true — the NFM (Non-Fox Media)
seem to have settled on denouncing him as a rich jerk.Postwar Rent Controls Mises Daily: by Robert L. Scheuttinger and Eamonn F. Butler
The Fed's Quasi-Fiscal Policies Mises Daily: by David Howden
Time Is Money: Capital and Interest Mises Daily: by Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler
Will Currency Devaluation Fix the Eurozone? Mises Daily: by Frank Shostak
Roubini said in Davos, Switzerland, on January 25, 2012, that tight
policies are making the recession in the eurozone worse. According to
Roubini what Europe needs is less austerity and more growth. In
particular, the NYU professor is concerned about the deep recession in
the eurozone's peripheral countries: Spain, Portugal, Greece — all are
on a strict regime of austerity. For instance, in Spain the yearly rate
of growth of government outlays stood at minus 12.4 percent in November
against minus 15.7 percent in the month before. In Portugal the yearly
rate of growth stood at minus 3.6 percent in December against minus 2.5
percent in November. In Greece the yearly rate of growth fell to 2.9
percent in December from 6.2 percent in the prior month.
A visible tightening is also observed in the two major European
economies of Germany and France. Year-on-year government outlays in
Germany stood at minus 1.6 percent in November versus minus 1.7 percent
in October. In France the yearly rate of growth stood at minus 12.4
percent in November against minus 12.3 percent in the prior month.
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