“It has been counted and counted, weighed and divided” said the writing on the wall at the Biblical feast of the doomed Belshazzar. Sounds like an economic forecast to me, in particular one for the thoroughly unpleasant 2005 that seems likely to unfold.

Fannie Mae’s accounting mishaps, the renewed protest over stock option expensing and the attempt not to count the transition costs of social security reform all emphasize one thing: Washington DC, whether or not the world capital overall, is unquestionably the world capital of Ponzi financing schemes, swindles that work for a year or two and […]

In his campaigns for President, Ross Perot used to talk about a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. manufacturing jobs moving overseas. From a Korn Ferry/New America Foundation symposium Wednesday on U.S. manufacturing’s decline, the sound can still be heard. It would appear however that the fault may lie in our own actions — thus the […]

British prime minister Tony Blair is said to be aiming Britain’s General Election, which must be held before June 2006, for May 2005, about the earliest he can reasonably hold it without attracting a storm of criticism. For the sake of his re-election, he’d better not delay it – because the British economy could be […]