By Shane Goldmacher, Los Angeles TimesJanuary 9, 2011 There will be little to like and something for just about everyone to hate. But it is in giving Californians a dose of painful budgetary truth that Brown hopes to succeed. To tame the state’s chronic budget shortfalls, the Democratic governor will request cuts in a broad […]
By The Economist onlineNov 10th 2010, 12:25 GOVERNMENTS have been indebted for centuries, running ongoing Ponzi schemes involving tax-payers, investors and future generations. But data sets on debt levels over time are rare (the most comprehensive ones only begin in the 1970s). A new paper from the IMF seeks to resolve this. Data gathered from […]
Posted by Euan MearnsDecember 31, 2010 – 7:57am A picture says a thousand words. In this post you will find only charts and graphs conveying important points from the world of energy 2010. Readers are invited to post their favorite charts from 2010 in the comments. Instructions are given at the end of this post. […]
By Tom Whipple Wednesday, December 29 2010 01:32:34 PM Wall Street is getting nervous. As oil prices continue to creep up and as more evidence accumulates that the age of ever-growing energy production and economic growth is coming to an end, a specter is haunting the great investment banks and brokerage houses of New York. […]
By David SwansonTuesday December 28, 2010 The fall and decline of an empire can take many years, but certain “benchmarks” (as imperial courts have been known to call them) can measure the progress in one year alone. Take, for example, the year 2010. This year opened with the United States Supreme Court claiming further power […]
By GRAEME SMITHPublished Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010 12:14AM EST ISLAMABAD — A terrifying kind of mathematics has become popular among aid workers, analysts and others who spend their lives tracking the fate of Pakistan. It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how the country will get through the coming years without declaring bankruptcy: take the country’s foreign […]
NEW YORK, 21 December 2010 (AP) — The world’s biggest gas-guzzling nation has limits after all. After seven decades of mostly uninterrupted growth, U.S. gasoline demand is at the start of a long-term decline. By 2030, Americans will burn at least 20 percent less gasoline than today, experts say, even as millions of more cars […]
By Chandni Rathod and Gus LubinDec. 14, 2010, 4:15 PM The hottest market in the hottest economy in the world is Chinese real estate. The big question is how vulnerable is this market to a crash. One red flag is the vast number of vacant homes spread through China, by some estimates up to 64 […]
Here are 2010’s most-viewed stories on Desdemona. A few have had further developments since they were posted, and I’ve noted this where appropriate. Not surprisingly, the most popular event was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with seven entries (that’s why this post is about the top twenty stories, instead of the top ten). Six of […]
By Gary, via Dmitry OrlovDecember 18, 2010 … In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of […]
