Well, Barack Hussein Obama is in - the 44th President of the Unite States - with a solid Democratic majority in the Congress and the Senate, and the right to appoint 2 or 3 new Supreme Court justices for life. When Ohio voted Democratic for the first time since Lincoln the race was all but [...]
Greg Ip quantifies the level of intervention thus far, and warns that there could be far more to come.
Before the crisis began, the Fed had $868 billion of assets, 91 percent of them in innocuous Treasury bills and bonds. Now it has $1.6 trillion in assets, with less than 30 percent of them [...]
Clearing out some of my macro notes; still keeping an eye on the banks, specifically their leverage, capitalisation and lending activity. The score so far: $501bn in write-downs, $353bn in new capital. Still $150bn worse off in terms of ability to weather further shocks than when this started. Kedrosky comments on the decreasing half-life of [...]
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian… The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in [...]
The Guardian reports on problems with introducing industrial herbicide to the food chain.
Gardeners have been warned not to eat home-grown vegetables contaminated by a powerful new herbicide that is destroying gardens and allotments across the UK… The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based [...]
From The Guardian:
Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review… The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials [...]
From The Guardian:
With funding from the European Space Agency, a team of engineers and scientists [at Reaction Engines] has come up with the A2, a plane they believe could carry 300 passengers at a top speed of more than 3,000mph… The A2 is designed to leave Brussels international airport, fly quietly and subsonically out into [...]
The Associated Press reports on the fallout from a break in two undersea cables which cut bandwidth from Europe to the Middle East by about 75%.
The lines that tie the globe together by carrying phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick where they lie on the ocean floor… The two [...]