“Regulated markets work best.” The words are coming from Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. After all, “we have traffic lights too,” he argued on Fox Business this Monday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was set up as an independent government agency in the 1970s with the stated goal of protecting […]
Bankers and bureaucrats want peaceful ties. Hardliners are convinced the West is conniving to keep them poor.
The economic factor tends to be overlooked in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shouldn’t be.
Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin stubbornly persists in his crusade for free-market capitalism though criticism of his “Roadmap for America’s Future” is fierce. In February, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag deconstructed Ryan’s plans, stating that although they address long-term fiscal problems, many lawmakers might find them “objectionable” because, as Politico put it, […]
Surprise, surprise, health-care reform is going to cost corporate America dearly. The Wall Street Journal reports that telephone giant AT&T is among the first businesses to announce multimillion dollar writedowns solely due to the health bill. “The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!” writes the paper. To make health-care reform appear financially responsible, […]
Old Europe is in something of an identity crisis. The specter of European federalism coupled with a widespread unease about Muslim immigration has many Europeans wondering about their nationhood and what it means to be “European” anyway. The financial meltdown and subsequent recession further fractured an already fragile self-image. Foreign immigration and decades of post-colonial […]
American secretary of state Hillary Clinton returned empty handed from Brazil earlier this month with President Lula da Silva’s government unwilling to support tougher sanctions on Iran. Brazil has long maintained that it wants proof of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions before it agrees to push for sanctions with the United Nations. Part of the reason […]
With dozens of states lining up to contest the constitutionality of health-care reform as it passed through Congress last week, there is ample reason to take this charge seriously, not treat it as the final breath of a party of sore losers. The states are fighting reform on two counts: first, that the Constitution doesn’t […]
The compromise which European leaders reached last week on aiding Greece may struck many foreign observers as evidence of the EU’s ineffectiveness at settling its internal discord, but it was in fact a minor victory for “President” Herman Van Rompuy and his campaign for greater economic governance from Brussels. Van Rompuy, former prime minister of […]
In a comprehensive study (PDF) presented to the Brookings Institution on Friday, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and noted laissez-faire economist Alan Greenspan traces the roots of the global economic downturn back many years, arguing that because the savings rate of the developed world soared in the decade preceding it and intentions to invest […]
Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, “People, not profits.” They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously defended. If quality health care disappears for Americans, it will have been killed by the […]
The treasury secretary misdiagnoses the financial crisis and offers the wrong solutions.
Two weeks ago, two British Tornado F3 fighter aircraft were scrambled from the Royal Air Force base Leuchars, the United Kingdom’s most northerly air defense station, to pursue two Russian Tupolev 160 bombers which were approximately one hundred nautical miles to the west of Stornaway on the northwest coast of Scotland. More than twenty of […]
The health-care reform bill must to back to the House for a revote. Democratic lawmakers in the Senate now have the possibility of including a public option after all.
Since the recent Federal Universal Healthcare Legislation has been made into quasi-law, state governments have been taking a stand for their constituents arguing that it is unconstitutional to force citizens to pay a penalty for refusing to participate in the federal health-care program. This includes states that Barack Obama both won and lost in the […]
