EU Should Move Beyond Carbon Market to Shut Coal, IEA Says … The European Union needs to think of other ways to prevent new coal-fired power stations from being built because its carbon market won't achieve that this decade, according to the International Energy Agency. Nations should consider measures including bans of new and inefficient plants known as "sub-critical," unless...Read More

House Speaker John Boehner: NSA Leaker a 'Traitor' … House Speaker John Boehner today called NSA leaker Edward Snowden a "traitor" who put Americans at risk by releasing classified information to the media. "He's a traitor," the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives said in an extensive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. &...Read More

Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden – The NSA Whistleblower Exposed as Career NSA, CIA, Special Forces Trained Agent … Oh yeah, he didn't tell us [anything] that we didn't already know. Yeah, he's a hero. UPDATE: Booz Allen Hamilton huh? Do you know who owns them, who our hero really works for? The Carlyle Group. Booz Allen Hamilton, like its rival SAIC, is involved in virtual...Read More

Building America's secret surveillance state … "God we trust," goes an old National Security Agency joke. "All others we monitor. Given the revelations last week about the NSA's domestic spying activities, the saying seems more prophecy than humor. First, the Guardian reported details on a domestic telephone dragnet in which Verizon was forced to give the NSA details a...Read More

Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom … The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled"… The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – a...Read More

The Mystery of Why Portugal Is So Doomed … Did relying too heavily on mom-and-pop businesses hobble one of Europe's most imperiled countries? It's possible. Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but the same isn't quite true of every unhappy euro country. The common currency's troubled economies all relied on foreign borrowing during the boom, and all went kap...Read More

As a candidate, Barack Obama vowed to bring a different, better kind of leadership to the dysfunctional capital. He'd make government more efficient, accountable and transparent. He'd rise above the "small-ball" nature of doing business. And he'd work with Republicans to break Washington paralysis. You can trust me, Obama said back in 2008. And – for a while, at least &...Read More

Surveillance revelations deepen European fears of Web giants … Europeans reacted angrily on Friday to revelations that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of Internet companies for personal data, saying such activity confirmed their worst fears about American Web giants' reach and showed tighter regulations were needed. – ReutersDominant Social Theme: We need more government re...Read More

British Intelligence watchdog flies to Washington to demand answers on snooping scandal … MPs from Britain's intelligence watchdog will to fly to Washington next week to seek guarantees that US spies are not snooping on Britons' emails. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, told The Daily Telegraph: 'We will get a report and decide if any f...Read More

Employment is still near a 30-year low …The employment-population ratio has barely changed in three years, showing that 58.6% of U.S. adults over age 16 had a job as of April. Forget the unemployment rate. The employment rate – the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job – has barely budged in the past three years. It's hovering near its lowest level in three decades, an...Read More

Aging Nations Like Low Prices Over High Income: Cutting Research … An elderly woman walks through a shopping street in Okayama, Japan. Wealth effects differ the world over as consumers in Europe and Japan are less affected by changes in equity and home prices than those in the U.S. The older a country's population, the lower its inflation rate, posing a challenge for central banks in the...Read More

The threat of “deviant” globalisation … The threat of “deviant” globalisation And yet it seems hardly surprising. Nor does it seem any more damaging than regular globalisation. A smart member of the global warrior elite “discovers” the next big threat … This convergence is what Stavridis calls “the dark side of globalization.” – The...Read More

IMF: Our Greek bailout was full of 'notable failures'… The International Monetary Fund has published a scathing internal self-assessment of its bailout of Greece three years ago. It isn't pretty. The IMF underestimated the damage that fiscal austerity would do to the Greek economy in its earliest rescue of the nation in 2010. It was too slow to promote a write-down of the nation&...Read More

The Obama climate move that nobody noticed … The Obama administration just made a fairly significant move on climate change, and it flew right under the radar … The [social cost of carbon] estimates using the updated versions of the models are higher than those reported in the 2010 [report]. By way of comparison, the four 2020 SCC estimates reported in the 2010 [report] were $7, $26, $...Read More

There's a worse crisis on the way unless we get serious about tackling debt … For all of the talk of austerity, Britain is still drowning in debt, private as well as public. 'Together, families and non-financial firms' debt is still worth 208pc of GDP and is merely back to levels last seen in mid-2007, a time when leverage was already utterly unsustainable. – UK TelegraphDo...Read More

Property prices turn one in five middle aged workers into paper millionaires … One in five middle aged people in Britain is a millionaire – on paper at least, a study of official figures shows. It has previously been estimated that around one in 10 people are living in millionaire households but the new analysis shows among some groups the figures is almost three times that. … In...Read More

MPs warned: block referendum law and it will be 'hung around your necks' … Politicians who attempt to block new legislation to ensure there will be a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU will have their actions "hung around their necks", the Conservative MP behind the proposed laws warns today. – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: There is no need for deba...Read More

Brazil calls in army to defuse conflicts over Indian lands … President Dilma Rousseff's government said on Tuesday it would send 110 federal troops to the Brazilian farm state of Mato Grosso do Sul to try to prevent more violence between Indians claiming their ancestral territory and ranchers. The government has been struggling to defuse tensions with indigenous tribes over farmland in s...Read More

The Fed and Inequality … Is the Federal Reserve a driving force behind the post-recession growth in inequality? It's a provocative idea, voiced by writers including Neil Irwin and Robert Frank. It is certainly true that inequality, in terms of both income and wealth, has widened since the recession. A study by the lauded economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley,...Read More

'Tuned Out' Investors Under Spell of QE: BIS … Equity markets shrugged off weak economic data and uncertainty in recent weeks and continued to extend their "relentless" gains fueled by the prospect of further stimulus, leaving them more vulnerable to shocks, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) said on Monday. – CNBCDominant Social Theme: The BIS is very worrie...Read More