The Race Is On to Find Organic Pesticides – Hunt for Beneficial Microbes Comes Amid Regulatory Scrutiny of Man-Made Chemical Insecticides … On his way to a conference in Orlando, Fla., Brian Vande Berg pulled his rental sedan over every 10 minutes to hike along beaches and marshes and occasionally stoop down to pack dirt into small, plastic vials. His target: microscopic, soil-dwelling...Read More

Denmark's central bank to stop producing money … The outsourcing of banknote and coin production will result in 100 million kroner in savings, the bank said. With more and more people paying with credit cards and their smartphones, Denmark's central bank Nationalbanken says it no longer pays to print banknotes or mint coins. – Denmark, The LocalDominant Social Theme: Digital mo...Read More

McDonald's May Sell More Organic Foods to Boost Sales … In today's "Morning Must Read," Bloomberg's Brendan Greeley recaps the op-ed pieces and analyst notes providing insight behind today's headlines on "Bloomberg Surveillance." McDonald's Corp. (MCD), which yesterday posted its fourth straight quarter of falling U.S. same-store sales, may look to sel...Read More

'Plunge protection' behind market's sudden recovery … Mysterious forces were trying their best, but they couldn't keep the stock market from swooning Wednesday. They failed in the morning, despite massive purchases of stock index futures contracts. Within minutes of the market's opening, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 350 points. Later in the day – after...Read More

Should you buy organic food? Is it just a status symbol, or is it really better for us? Is it really better for the environment? What about organic produce grown thousands of miles from our kitchens, in countries like India? Is organic better than local? A lot of consumers who would like to do the right thing for their health and the environment are asking such questions. "India's Organic...Read More

Zombie Ideas That Keep on Losing … The worst of today's political malfeasance is being driven by failed ideologies. Zombie ideas that refuse to die have become enshrined in our collective intellectual legacy. The people behind these have been insulated from the economic costs they impose. Blame the billionaires. – BloombergDominant Social Theme: There are so many bad memes. Why do...Read More

Uruguay's roll-out of marijuana experiment faces election risk … Uruguay is struggling to roll out the commercial production and sale of marijuana and its ground-breaking experiment could be dropped or watered down if an opposition candidate wins this month's presidential election. – ReutersDominant Social Theme: Cannabis legalization is too complex to work. The state has a nea...Read More

Here Comes the Internet of Money … Paul Volcker, the acclaimed former chairman of the Federal Reserve, famously questioned the value of financial innovation. He said he saw the point of the automated teller machine ("more of a mechanical innovation than a financial one"), but that was about it. Financial innovation was an unproductive competition for excess profit and a cause of in...Read More

Texas Puts Marijuana Reform on Legislative Agenda for 2015— Marijuana reform in Texas has been a long time coming, but as the end of this momentous year in cannabis legalization draws to a close, it is now on the legislative road map of reform, potentially as soon as 2015. The State Legislature plans to take up decriminalization in January, on the heels of states around states around the cou...Read More

Nanny State… The Best Regulator? That's Easy. It's the Market. … As the Goldman Sachs tapes show, regulators almost always fail. In other cases, they cheat consumers out of choices. Leave it to the market. – The Daily BeastDominant Social Theme: Regulation … what good is it?Free-Market Analysis: Remarkably, we continue to see articles about regulatory capture. The l...Read More

Behind the Mask of Altruism: Imperialism, Monsanto and the Gates Foundation in Africa … Since 2006, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to the tune of almost $420 million. Activists from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia recently attended the US-Africa Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit in Seattle to argue...Read More

The height of idiocy: US Government hijacks the whole Swiss banking system … True story … One of our SMC members just received a package from HSBC giving him and his wife a deadline to comply with FATCA—US' global tax law … Suddenly they had just four weeks to prove that they were not US taxpayers, all because at one point they had purchased a service that gave them a U...Read More

Whole Foods to roll out rankings for produce… Whole Foods plans to start rolling out a system that ranks fruits and vegetables as "good," ''better" or "best" based on the supplier's farming practices. Most notably, the supermarket chain says its "responsibly grown" labeling system for produce and flowers will prohibit the use of several common p...Read More

The great Lira revolt has begun in Italy … Italy's Five Star Movement has thrown down the gauntlet, calling for a euro referendum to end depression and save democracy, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard … The die is cast in Italy. Beppe Grillo's Five Star movement has launched a petition to drive for Italian withdrawal from Europe's monetary union and for the restoration of eco...Read More

Government wants farmers to quit farming … It seems that U.S. companies would follow the unprecedented action of Japan's equivalent to WalMart if they could figure out how to force farmers to quit farming their land and let the companies grow food crops exactly as they think is "sustainable agriculture." – AgProfessionalDominant Social Themes: Farmers have to work more ef...Read More

Nobel for Charles Barkley of Economics … If you could summarize Tirole's area of research in a single sentence, it would be about corporations. One might think that corporations are one of the easiest, most natural things for economists to study, but one would be wrong – in fact, many economists wonder why corporations even exist … Notice that Tirole's work on regulation...Read More

To grow cheap marijuana, Italy calls in the army – Italy legalized marijuana for medical use last year, but the high cost of buying legal pot in a pharmacy meant few people signed up. Now, the government has found a solution: get the army to grow it. Starting next year, a high-security lab in a military compound in Florence will grow cannabis for Italy's health care system in an experime...Read More

Stocks in Dubai crashed 6.5% on Sunday. This was the biggest drop in four months and brings the Dubai Financial Market General Index to its lowest level since July 20, according to Bloomberg. Dubai, which like many Middle East exchanges is open from Sunday to Thursday, led a broad sell-off in Middle East stocks, as markets in Israel, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia also sold off on Sunday. – Busines...Read More

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) agencies investigated the appearance of what appeared to be GE wheat on an Oregon farm, and concluded that it was an isolated incident. The investigation was closed after 'exhausting all leads,' but new GMO wheat has been detected at the Montana State University's Southern Ag...Read More

Google's Schmidt: Surveillance fears are going to end up breaking the Internet … Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) took the opportunity to slam National Security Agency surveillance work as part of an unacceptable "digital dragnet." But the hour-long session quickly shifted from talk about the digital economy to the risks posed by government surveillance programs to human-to-human communi...Read More