Job Data Casts Pall Over Economic Recovery
THE NEW YORK TIMES: A shadow fell across America’s economic recovery on Friday, as the Labor Department’s monthly report showed that job growth was weak in the private sector, provoking a precipitous sell-off in the stock market.

The headline numbers for May suggested reason for optimism — employers added 431,000 jobs and the jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent, from 9.9 percent in April. But the underlying numbers showed that almost all of the growth came from the 411,000 workers hired by the federal government to help with the Census. Most of those jobs will end in a few months.

By contrast, the private sector created 41,000 positions, far short of expectations for 150,000 to 180,000 jobs. And the number of long-term unemployed, those Americans out of work for 27 or more weeks, remained at its highest level since the Labor Department began collecting such data in the 1940s. >>> Michael Powell | Friday, June 04, 2010

Hungary's Economic Woes Punish Euro, Roil Markets
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Pessimistic words on the economy from senior officials of Hungary's newly elected ruling party plunged the euro to a four-year low Friday, and refocused concern on a region that European Union leaders had hoped was recovering from the wounds it suffered in the early days of the financial crisis.

Lajos Kosa, vice president of the right-leaning Fidesz party, which won an overwhelming victory in the April elections, said Thursday that Hungary was in a Greek-style sovereign-debt crisis. And Friday, the prime minister's spokesman, Peter Szijjarto, roiled markets by saying the economic situation is severe and that Hungary isn't likely to meet budget-deficit targets prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.

Hungary in 2008 became the first EU country since the U.K. in 1976 to take an IMF bailout. That fall, it lost access to capital markets and couldn't raise money to cover its deficits.

Mr. Szijjarto's remarks clobbered the Hungarian forint and the euro Friday. The reaction spilled over into sovereign debt-insurance markets across Europe and into the currencies of Poland and the Czech Republic, the two other large non-euro countries in the former Communist east.

The euro sank below $1.20 to a fresh four-year low, trading at $1.1966 late Friday in New York. The cost to insure against sovereign debt default rose sharply early Friday in Europe—to the highest levels in nearly a month for Greece and Portugal. Bigger economies, such as Spain and Italy, also saw debt-default insurance costs rise to their highest levels since at least the start of 2009, according to data provider Markit. >>> Charles Forelle in Brussels and Veronika Gulyas and Margit Feher in Budapest | Friday, June 05, 2010

Euro Slides as Hungary Says Economy in Trouble
TIMES ONLINE: The euro slumped to a four-year low against the dollar yesterday amid concerns that Europe’s debt crisis will worsen still further after Hungary said that its economy was in a “very grave situation”.

Stock markets in Europe and the United States also slid sharply lower as concerns about the worsening debt crisis combined with figures from the US showing slower than expected growth in American employment figures — and rumours of trading losses at Société Générale.

In London, the FTSE closed down 1.6 per cent at 5,126 points. In Frankfurt the Dax dropped more than 2 per cent, in Paris the CAC 40 was down 2.8 per cent, while Madrid slumped by an even more severe 3.8 per cent. In New York the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 3 per cent, slipping under the 10,000 level to close at 9,931.97, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indices both suffered losses of about 2.7 per cent. >>> Alexandra Frean, New York and Adam Sage, Paris | Saturday, June 05, 2010

News Hub: BMW's New M3

News Hub: Gay Couples and the Taxes They Pay

You Put Your iPad in What?!

digits: The Future of PCs

California to Ban Plastic Bags
THE TELEGRAPH: California is to become the first US state to ban plastic bags in supermarkets in a move Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called a "great victory for the environment."

Shoppers will have to bring their own reusable bags or pay at least 5 cents (3p) each for recycled paper ones under the ban which was approved by state politicians.

Californians currently use an estimated 19 billion plastic bags a year, equivalent to 552 for each person, only five per cent of which are reused.

The cities of San Francisco and Malibu had already banned plastic bags and the statewide ban, which also includes pharmacies, grocery stores and liquor stores, is likely to begin at the start of 2012. >>> Nick Allen in Los Angeles | Thursday, June 03, 2010

Peter Foster: George Osborne Visits China and Reveals His Astonishing Naivety
TELEGRAPH – BLOGS: Perhaps it’s not surprising that George Osborne chose China for his first major overseas trip as Chancellor, trumpeting the prospects of growing Britain’s exports to the Middle Kingdom as a route out of Britain’s economic morass.

“If you’re looking to answer the big question for Britain, which is where the growth is going to come from in the next few years, I think exports – and exports to an economy the size of China – is one place we should be looking,” he said.

But it was hard not to wonder how this ebullience could be squared with the recent pronouncements of the EU and US ambassadors to the WTO, who this week complained bitterly about China’s rampant and rising back-door protectionism.

The two ambassadors openly accused China of increasing barriers to market access over just the last two years – by being “highly selective” in granting access to foreign companies seeking to do business there, and “stagnating” its market access reforms.

Asked if he was concerned, a pallid Mr Osborne mustered only the usual line that, “It is in China’s interest and in our interest that we form an alliance against protectionist forces across the world.” What? But that’s the exactly point, dear Chancellor. As the two Ambassadors made clear, the “forces of protectionism” are right here, right now in China. Read on and comment >>> Peter Foster | Friday, June 04, 2010

The Bankrupt State – Greece
Watch Journeyman Pictures video here

Apple CEO Steve Jobs Talks About Flash

Obama On Hurricane, Oil Spill Damage

Freedom Watch: Rising Awareness On Rising Debt

Obama: ‘This Is the Best Job on Earth’

French Winelovers Fight to Cork Their Bottles
THE TELEGRAPH: French defenders of natural wine corks have launched a multi-million pound offensive to counter the rise of the screw cap and plastic stopper, which they argue kill the mystique of bottle-opening.

Debate has been raging for years over whether the familiar sound of popping corks should be ditched in favour of alternatives that reduce the risk of a "corked" wine.

Cork stoppers have been used for centuries, but their dominance has gradually dropped from 95 per cent of the world wine bottle market to 70 per cent over the past 15 years.

But France's cork federation has hit back at those who say the spongy bark has had its day with a poll suggesting that almost nine out of ten French people prefer the traditional stopper.

They are using the figure to spearhead a massive poster campaign featuring wine and champagne bottles with bizarre alternative stoppers - from a perfume spray top to a plastic duck – with the slogan: "Always imitated, never equalled".

Eight out of ten French people, the Ipsos poll suggests, also equate real cork with quality wine, well-preserved aromas and long conservation. Almost all said cork perpetuated age-old savoir-faire. >>> Henry Samuel in Paris | Thursday, June 03, 2010

THE SHREWD ECONOMIST: Put a cork in it! >>>

WATCH SHORT BBC VIDEO: Cork harvest >>> | Friday, September 05, 2008

LISTEN TO BBC AUDIO: Cork industry under threat: Cork has been described as 'the ultimate green product', but the industry is under threat. >>> Paul Henry | Friday, September 05, 2010

Germany Signals End of Love Affair with Europe
THE GUARDIAN: Germany is increasingly resentful of being seen as the cashpoint for its cash-strapped southern neighbours

German chancellor Angela Merkel reacts to Ronald Pofalla, chief of staff at the chancellery, during the final parliamentary debate of a €750bn eurozone rescue package in Berlin. Photograph: The Guardian
At a recent summit of European leaders in Brussels, Angela Merkel was feeling tetchy.

As the 27 government chiefs wrestled with compulsory jobs targets for the decade ahead, the German chancellor balked when asked to stick to the same employment rate as everyone else.

"Not all the member states will reach that target," she answered, according to a note of the summit made available to the Guardian. "If some don't go so far, does this mean Germany has to [go further]?" No one asked Berlin to do more than its partners. But Merkel suspected otherwise. The discussion turned to climate change targets. Again Merkel complained. Germany, she signalled, was getting a raw deal in Europe, a sentiment reinforced by senior people in her entourage such as Uwe Corsepius, her influential European adviser.

The prickliness is symptomatic of the change in how Berlin sees the EU. For 50 years, Europe has been Germany's passport to peace, prosperity and power. When Germany pursued its national interests, it did so effectively, benignly and called it "Europa". Those days are over. The German elite feels maligned and misunderstood. In public, and much more frankly in private, senior figures talk of robustly asserting the German national interest.

"It may be new for Europe that Germany is representing its interests with new vigour," said Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister and a Merkel confidant. "But for Britain, France or Italy, this was always a matter of course."

"The mood among the Germans is quite defensive. They feel people are ganging up on them," said an EU ambassador.

A senior official in Brussels who deals regularly with Merkel added: "The love affair [with Europe] is over. When I meet German journalists, they ask 'what is the added value of Europe for Germany'."

The change – from pushing Europe forward to balking at the sacrifices Germany has to make – is a tectonic shift in the EU.

Nowhere has the new approach been more striking than in the euro crisis, where Merkel's mixture of hectoring and hesitation has shocked fellow EU leaders and generated mutual recrimination. The financial crisis exposed fundamental differences in outlook between northern and southern Europe, and conflicts of national interest between Germany and France. Egged on by both the tabloids and quality newspapers engaging in an orgy of Greece-bashing and injured outrage verging on self-pity, Berlin is slumped in surly resentment at being seen as the cashpoint for cash-strapped southern Europeans. >>> Ian Traynor in Brussels | Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Euro Slides, Stock Markets Fall as China, Europe Fuel Fears for World Recovery
THE TELEGRAPH: The FTSE 100 joined a fresh global market sell-off and the euro hit new four-year lows on jitters for the world economy after a fall in Chinese factory production and worries over the ability of European banks to weather a escalating eurozone crisis.

The euro sank fell more than 1pc against the dollar to $1.2115 as deteriorating sentiment along with rising tensions in the Middle-East following Israel's storming of Gaza-bound aid ships bound fuelled safe-haven demand for the dollar. >>> | Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Dollarless in Seattle
Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company Prince Alwaleed bin Talal with billionaire businessman Bill Gates at the 14th Microsoft CEO Summit in Washington, Seattle. The summit was attended by 100 top CEOs. Prince Alwaleed and Gates are co-owners of the Four Seasons group of hotels and resorts. [Source: Arab News]

Rare Blessing of Black Economy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Three weeks after the launch of a €750 billion ($921.15 billion) emergency package to bolster the euro zone's debt-stricken economies, there is little sign of a turning of the tide.

Policy makers struggle with dire official figures on the state of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. But it may be the unofficial, or underground, economy in these countries which may provide a cushion against social convulsion—and hope of salvation.

Certainly there is little in official circles to give cause for comfort. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is proposing new financial governance machinery to prevent future debt crises. But his own country's triple-A credit status looks to be next in the crosshairs of the rating firms.

Doubts persist over whether the German Constitutional Court will back the arguments deployed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to justify her government's participation in the rescue package.

In Spain, there are fresh doubts over a package of labor reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund, the country's own central bank and others. The country's embattled socialist government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has had to extend a deadline on agreeing the reforms. An opinion poll shows most Spaniards now want early elections in which the conservative opposition would be likely to emerge a clear winner. And as if these problems weren't enough, thecountry's two largest trade unions are calling a general strike.

Euro-zone countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and now France have almost fallen over themselves in their anxiety to announce austerity packages before apprehensive bond investors leave them no alternative. But the very austerity programs intended to cauterize the rise in debt are as likely to make it worse, as domestic spending is depressed, tax revenue falls and more citizens become dependent on state welfare.

After Greece, the next economy in the single-currency area likely to fall victim to this austerity Catch-22 is Spain. Its budget deficit at 11.2% of gross domestic product is the highest after Greece. Friday, rating agency Fitch & Co downgraded its country debt rating from triple-A to double-A-plus. In its explanatory note, Fitch argued that "the process of adjustment to a lower level of private-sector and external indebtedness will materially reduce the rate of growth of the Spanish economy over the medium term." Read on and comment >>> Bill Jamieson* | Tuesday, June 01, 2010

*Bill Jamieson is Executive Editor of The Scotsman

At Last, a Fair and Balanced View of Ayn Rand
TRIBUNE MAGAZINE: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns
Oxford University Press, £16.99

At last! A well balanced book about Ayn Rand (1905-82), the guru of selfishness. After all the attack memoirs and right-wing adulation, Jennifer Burns has finally given us an intellectual biography of the founder of objectivism that can truly be described as objective. Burns explains Rand’s integrated system of ideas in clear language, showing us how it developed out of her life experiences and personal relationships, both intellectual and emotional. To her credit, Burns resists the temptation to snipe at such an inviting target as the elitist and dogmatic Rand and, wherever possible, she presents negative criticism using the original words of Rand’s colleagues and contemporaries.

Goddess of the Market traces Rand’s irresistible rise from bourgeois Russian origins to fame and fortune in America and shows how the success of her two blockbuster novels – The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) – which both glorified heroic individualism – allowed her to use her celebrity as a platform for her subsequent career as political ideologue and philosopher. She invented an abstract rational system called objectivism, which was designed to keep the world safe from communism by proving (mostly by assertion) that capitalism was the most rational and moral form of human society.

But even as an anti-communist in America, she discovered that she didn’t quite fit in. She was an atheist iconoclast, not a traditionalist reactionary, and was forced to create her own niche on the contrarian far right, promoting guilt-free wealth creation and denouncing the state, but viciously opposed to libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and religious conservatives. Thus she escaped from the tyranny of collectivism in Russia only to end up in a self-created dystopia of heightened rhetoric where she lived out a life of extreme alarmism, always imagining civilisation was crashing around her ears. >>> Roddy Matthews |Friday, May 28, 2010

HT: Guido Fawkes >>>

United Kingdom: Public Sector Rich List


THE TELEGRAPH: Public sector rich list: salaries of civil servants who earn more than PM: The pay of more than 170 senior civil servants who earn more than the Prime Minister have been disclosed as the starting point of a radical move towards more open government. >>> Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor | Monday, May 31, 2010

Fat Cat Civil Servants >>>