John Quiggin writes about the banking crisis:
Suppose Bank A owes a trillion dollars to bank B which in turn owes a trillion to C which in turn owes a trillion to D which owes a trillion to A. Now suppose that A gets into liquidity trouble and can’t pay. Then B is similarly in trouble [...]

Well, sort of. I somehow doubt Jean Monnet would have been thinking of this when he came up with the idea of a Europe so closely bound together by trade war would be forever impossible. Rogue Planet reports that the biggest buyer of Bosnian armaments is…Serbia. Bosnia is also the biggest supplier to Serbia. Yes, [...]

PARNELL came down the road,
he said to a cheering man:
“Ireland shall get her freedom
and you still break stone.”
– W.B. Yeats

So Kosovo will declare its independence tomorrow.
Regular readers of this blog will already know my position on Kosovar independence: I completely lack enthusiasm for it, but think it’s the least bad solution. It’s been almost nine years since the 1999 war, and pretty much every alternative has been explored at length. The current [...]

I’ll do a rare US-centric post, because this kind of stunned me. Rauch argues that republicans will call a democratic withdrawal from Iraq a stab in the back, and to avoid that Democrats should stretch out withdrawal over several years.
Why that would stop the wingnuts from shouting treason he doesn’t bother to explain, but [...]

Surfing around the internet looking for more information on ecological economics I came across the Ecological Economics weblog and a podcast by Josh Farley, assistant professor at the University of Vermont. In his podcast Farley talks about the unsustainability of the concept of indefinite economic growth: Beyond economic growth by Josh Farley.
I post this [...]

Spanish banks borrowed up to EUR 44 billion in December from the European Central Bank, “replacing banks’ use of wholesale capital markets, which have been strangled by the global credit crunch,” writes today’s FT. Furthermore, “The Spanish banking system is second only to the UK in Europe in its use of mortgage-backed bond makrets and [...]

Salvador Dali on 1960s (?) US gameshow “What’s My Line”.

Via the estimable Eddie Campbell, who also made a lovely little doodle. And here’s one of Dorothy Sawyers! Let’s hope it’ll be longrunning series.

Bad news for the old crook.
Through his family-controlled Fininvest empire, Berlusconi runs Mediaset, by far the biggest commercial TV broadcaster in Italy. His empire also runs the biggest national advertiser, the biggest publisher and much else. Given Italy’s long tradition of political interference with public sector broadcasting, this means that when he has been prime [...]

Eurovision is in Belgrade this year. Beo Grad, the white city of Serbia! Where the Danube meets, you know, some other river!
Pretty cool, no? It will be the first Eurovision in the former Yugoslavia. (Yes, there was a Eurovision in Yugoslavia in 1989. But it wasn’t former then. Doesn’t [...]