There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the [...]

Population changes are going to bring many cultural changes in their wake: and I’m not thinking only of immigration and multiculturalism here. Ageing populations will have different tastes and preferences, among them, apparently, will be changes in the quantity and types of alchohol consumed.
Among the explantations offered for the fact that the nation of beerdrinkers [...]

While EU politicians over at Davos have been mulling over the possibilities of Turkey’s membership of the EU, Kofi Annan apparently has things much clearer. In a speech to the European parliament he bluntly told MPs that Europe needs migrants to ensure a prosperous future and that Europeans should stop using immigration as a [...]

Say hello to another 1,276,000 inhabitants of the EU in 2003, bringing the total to 380.8 million people on January 1st 2004. Most of them were immigrants, out of the total increase of 3.4 people for every 1000 inhabitants, 2.6 was down to net migration while only 0.8 was accounted for by natural increase (births [...]

On a day which sees the Parmalat heat being turned up to full blast, with a looming ‘cara a cara’ between former Chief Financial Officer Fausto Tonna and Parmalat chief legal counsel Gian Paolo Zini, and while in the United States a class action law firm has named investment bank Citigroup Inc and auditing [...]

I want to make sure Edward doesn’t miss this.
Josh Marshall quotes from a Fortune interview with Peter Drucker:
“FORTUNE: You sound fairly sanguine about the state of the U.S. economy. Do you see any danger signs?
DRUCKER: Oh, yes. The biggest problem I see is our total dependence on foreign money to cover our government debt. Never [...]

The sinking of a boatload of Somali immigrants off the island of Lampedusa seems to have set off something akin to a feeling of collective remorse in Italy. (Would that the human tragedy that is occuring on a regular basis just off the straits of Gibraltar could provoke a similar reaction here in Spain!) Indeed [...]