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European foreign ministers have approved an oil embargo against Iran. The sanctions ban any new oil contracts with Iran, while existing contracts will be honored until July 1st. While this might seem like a good way to way to stall Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it will only serve to unite the Iranian people and worsen the [...]
Filed under: Europe, Foreign policy, Politics, Trade
There has been more bad news out of Europe today. On top of the downgrades of several eurozone countries and the EFSF bailout fund, Germany today announced that it has lowered its growth forecasts for 2012 from 1% to 0.7%. Throughout the euro crisis Germany has been central to the bailouts of struggling countries, contributing [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Economics, Politics, Trade, World
Dow Jones reports that a federal bankruptcy judge gave the go-ahead for Hostess to begin tapping a $75 million loan to keep the company above water while during bankruptcy proceedings. Some attribute Hostess’ troubles to healthier eating habits among Americans, the USA Today article on their filing states: Hostess has enough cash to keep stores [...]
These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical [...]
Last year, Barack Obama committed his administration to doubling U.S. exports in half a decade. The good news: He is on the way. U.S. exports of goods and services grew in 2010 by 16.6 percent. Bad news: U.S. imports, starting from a higher base, surged by 19.7 percent. Result: The U.S. trade deficit in 2010 [...]
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man’s papers are to be housed. “What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is that [...]
Filed under: History, Immigration, Trade
Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East. So states a new report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, adding: “Saturation missile strikes could destroy U.S. air defenses, runways, parked aircraft, and fuel and maintenance facilities. Complicating this scenario is the future [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Trade, War
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth. A [...]
For those who can yet recall the backyard blast furnaces of Mao’s China in the 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to re-instill peasant values in the 1970s, the news was jarring. In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since [...]
So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home. By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Immigration, Trade, World