A year ago, Australia's treasurer, Wayne Swan, boasted that the nation's budget for 2013 would have a surplus of 1.5 billion Australian dollars. This was supposed to herald a fall election campaign based on the wise stewardship of the ruling Labor Party and its prime minister, Julia Gillard. It now...

Just when everyone thought the Cypriote banking disaster could not get any worse-how can it get worse when the government is desperate enough to steal bank depositors' money-it has suddenly become much worse. The President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, is back on his hands and knees, begging the European Union...

For those who thought that the Eurozone debt crisis had simply gone away, they received a rude reminder that this destructive fiscal disaster is not only still with us, but that its contagion continues to metastasize. The private banks in Cyprus were among many privately-owned financial institutions in the Eurozone...

Russian roulette is the macabre game of death, in which a revolver with a single bullet is passed around, each player pointing a gun at his head and pressing the trigger. There is, mathematically speaking, a one in six chance of blowing one's brains to smithereens. This morbid game of...

The British economy, still struggling from the aftereffects of the 2008 Global Economic Crisis and financial disaster, now has received another boot in its ribcage. Moody's, one of the three major credit rating agencies, has cut its assessment of the UK's sovereign debt form AAA to Aa1.

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With the Dow Jones having reached 14,000, it can be said that the worst losses on the index since 2008 have been made whole. But does that mean the global economic crisis is over? Hardly, as what we are seeing on Wall Street is totally unconnected to the real economy,...

The so-called fiscal cliff, a creation of Washington politicians, means that a tsunami of tax increases and spending cuts will batter the American economy, due to, among other things, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. As the United States is still coping with a severe economic crisis, and depends...

At their most recent meeting, the finance ministers representing the 17 countries that comprise the eurozone, along with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and ECB (European Central Bank), have thus far failed to decide on releasing the next tranche of bailout funds to insolvent Greece. Without the bailout money being...

First there was Greece, then Ireland and Portugal, and now Spain. The last of the PIIGS nations afflicted with massive sovereign debt is Italy. Massive public debts and annual deficits, its bonds periodically hovering at the seven percent dangerous yield level on long term sovereign debt, the Italian economy is...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics latest jobs report suggested 114,000 non-farm jobs were added in September, while the national unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. With the U.S. presidential election only one month away, the Republicans naturally claimed that something was fishy about the jobs...

If Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is concerned about the Eurozone debt crisis, than it is a signal for just about every other major economy to start sweating bullets. This is what the head of the Chinese government said recently: "The European debt crisis has continued to worsen, giving...

Almost instantaneously, as soon as governments across the globe went into unparalleled debt to bail out their financial systems beginning in 2008, economists openly were discussing the impossibility of ever paying back those sovereign loans, and that a different solution was required. The answer, so the economists said amongst themselves,...

As a percentage of GDP, China's economic stimulus program of 2009 was the largest in the world, and second place to the U.S. in monetary terms. Ironically, the supposedly Communist economy of the People's Republic of China became the last best hope of world capitalism, in the wake of the...

He emerged in the months prior to the global financial and economic crisis that erupted in the fall of 2008, warning of a deadly convergence of worrying economic and financial dangers. Nouriel Roubini, economics professor at New York University and owner of his own consultancy firm, issued warnings that in...

The latest report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic indicates that only 80,000 jobs were created in the United States in June. One must take into account that the BLS figures are abstractions and not exact, and usually reveal only the most optimistic spin of the employment data. The...

In the controversy over Iran's nuclear program, Israel's policy of claiming that an Iranian nuclear weapon represents an existential threat has prompted Tehran's apologists to maintain that Israeli officials exaggerate the danger. In particular, these critics lambaste Israelis for comparing the theocratic clique running Tehran's government with the regime of...

The latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the United States supposedly "created" 115,00 jobs in April. Not even President Obama's supporters are cheering loudly over this figure, as it indicates a slowing down of job creation -- and that is if the number is...

People usually resign from a position through a private letter to the boss. Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs executive director based out of London who manages U.S. equity derivatives for clients in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, chose a different method when he decided to leave the payroll of...

The current Eurozone debt crisis is not only an acute economic and debt crisis. It is also political farce, with a heavy dose of irony. The motivation for the creation of the euro was noble; the European continent had ripped itself apart over centuries of internecine warfare, culminating with two...

On February 4, 2012 one of the saddest events in the history of the United Nations Security Council occurred. A resolution seeking to end the violent suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Syria and largely sponsored by the Arab League was vetoed by Russia and China. Though 13 out of...