Your US federal government, the benchmark for effective policymaking that we can only approach by creating a similar monster state: they are still promising to balance the budget, as if that was a) realistic and b) desirable.

In America, “I’ll take my lane in the middle” is a figure of speech. In Georgia, it’s a way of life.
That is all.

There are essentially two basic critiques of the EU’s institutions; one is the classic, Monnet/Schuman house ideology view that its problems are simply because there isn’t enough of it. If it was more like the US federal government, it would work better; and, as we designed it to get more like that, it must be [...]

To be fair, Paul Krugman was a pretty darn good economist even before he took up blogging…

The Nation has a cracking, snarky and sharply reported, story out about Rick Davies (John McCain’s campaign manager) and his role in the run-up to Montenegrin independence. Read the whole thing, as they say. What struck me about it was first that AFOE had a damn good little controversy of its own about the same [...]

Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, has won the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize “for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.
Finland has it all!

In my work inbox this morning, a message from TeleGeography. Their latest report on IP transit pricing is out. This bit struck me: 1,000Mbits of transit over Gigabit Ethernet in Bucharest now costs no more than it does in London - and only a couple of dollars more than in San Francisco. That’s incredible, and [...]

Canada is interested in a huge bilateral agreement with the European Union, which going by the details given would almost amount to membership in the EEA. Cool.
Ironically, in the years when the British Empire was either trying to recast itself as an EU-like economic union or trying to get into the ECSC/EEC with all its [...]

When I asked, “Who’s next?” I neglected to post the answers which were Washington Mutual and Ukraine. Hope that I was only half-right.

“It should be noted that AIG wrote its derivative contracts in London.” – Commenter Thomas, at Crooked Timber
And indeed, we see a report on Bloomberg, the wire service the financial folks use to communicate with each other, that Allianz was involved in a bid for AIG two days before the crisis that led to its [...]