Politics Roundtable

So, the urban development that kicked off all the protests in Turkey.

“This is the only place to hang out here,” says Yavuz Selim, 17. “And everything is very expensive. As students we cannot afford it.” His friends agree. “We are quite bored here. There is nothing to do ...

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Niall Ferguson in the Wall Street Journal –

In only one category out of 22 (in World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report) is the U.S. ranked in the global top 20 (the strength of investor protection). In ...

Q&A portion with Mario Draghi during the ECB news conference yesterday –

Q: [...] Are you telling the Spanish, Portuguese, Irish or even Italian people that the ECB can’t do anything else with inflation actually lower than 2%?

Draghi: Well, I am not sure I get the point, but I think ...

From the IMF assessment of its 2010 program for Greece, the section dealing with relations within the Troika i.e. European Commission (EC) and ECB (p31) –

And from the Fund’s perspective, the EC, with the focus of its reforms more on compliance with EU norms than on growth impact, was not ...

I picked up this OECD chart from Sigrun Davidsdottir on twitter:

Although many in #Iceland worry/feel that a bubble is forming inside capital controls, property prices seem balanced:

Pawel Morski:

A “banking system responsive to local needs” quickly becomes “piggy bank for local politicians”.

Well, local politicians are elected, after all. Democracy is a thing. But I know what he means. That Spanish caja that was run, into the ground, by the Catholic Church. That kind of thing. ...

From the department of cross-European otherness: some German politicians never finished their university degrees. Apparently, this is shocking. To the point where some of them worry about explaining it to their sons, and Green leader Claudia Roth gets hate mail for it.

That said, more than one confesses to having ...

“You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself, ...

The future never resembles the past – as we well know. But, generally speaking, our imagination and our knowledge are too weak to tell us what particular changes to expect. We do not know what the future holds. Nevertheless, as living and moving beings, we are forced to act. – ...

In a number of posts recently I have highlighted the impact of declining workforces on economic growth (here, for example, or here, or here)�and the way the policies persued to address the Euro debt crisis are having the impact of� accelerating the movement of young people away ...