I have no idea whether the report pubished by the UK Daily Mirror that George W Bush discussed with Tony Blair the idea of bombing the Doha headquarters of the Arabic satellite TV channel al-Jazeera is well founded or not. How could I, I have no way of checking one way or the other. [...]

Sorry, this is not a post proclaiming a political theory of everything. It’s a note saying “‘Tis done!” I picked up Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World sooner than I thought and finished it up right quick.
Previous posts on the Baroque Cycle are here, here, here and here. The argument of the trilogy and [...]

I know you should never take what a central banker says at face value, but still. Today Christopher Swann in Washington tells us (in an article entitled: End in sight to the Fed’s rate-tightening cycle - and with no question mark):
For much of the past year and a half the Fed has been running almost [...]

How would you like your eggs done here sir, scrambled or sunny- side up? Of course my hilarity here may be due to the fact that Huevos in Spanish has a rather different connotation:
A South Korean scientist whose cloning of a dog Time magazine called this year’s most amazing invention resigned on Thursday as head [...]

The always interesting Paul de Grauwe has a piece in the FT today (subscription only unfortunately, but he does collect all his FT pieces on his website here, so it will doubtless appear eventually). Basically he is arguing a view which I agree with: in its enthusiasm for raising interest rates the ECB is overdoing [...]

While China seems to be badly in need of entering the ‘information society’, Russia seems to be going flat-out in the opposite direction:
Russia moved closer to an effective ban on many foreign non-governmental organisations as its parliament on Wednesday considered a bill that human rights groups have criticised as another step towards a “totally closed [...]

Whatever the underlying reality behind all the news headlines about ‘panic in Harbin’ one thing is sure, there are plenty of asymmetries pending resolution between the ultra-modern and sophistocated new-technology China and the ‘informationally closed’ political system which breeds a lack of trust and the kinds of over-reaction we are now seeing. China obviously [...]

First off, Dave at MacroBlog has a good summary of the core of the economic policy programme adopted by the new German government. He also has some to-the-point comments about ECB credibility issues
But the big news today must surely be the surprising state of the European consumer . Perhaps the most indicative reading on the [...]

Wasn’t Gerhard Schroeder fun? Didn’t Germany, maybe more than any other big country in Europe, need a leader who enjoyed things? Hasn’t public life gotten just a little grayer this late November Tuesday?
The election in ‘98 showed that Germany could actually change governments at the ballot box, and not just through parliamentary maneuvers. One more [...]

European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet’s indication last Friday that eurozone interest rates are about to rise continues to make waves.
Yesterday the EU Observer had a piece indicating the Eurozone finance ministers were not amused, and today we have a retaliatory piece were Trichet explains theat the ECB is the ‘listening’ people bank, which [...]