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Over the weekend June 25-26, 2011, the Basel Committee made the decision to raise bank capital reserve requirements from 7% to 9.5%. Wall Street Journal and analyst estimates show that Bank of America, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan Chase will have to together raise $150 billon in additional capital. The rule gives the banks time till 2019 to reach the new goal. Banks that get even bigger could face an additional one percentage point increase to 10.5%. As of the end of the 1st quarter of 2011, J.P. Morgan had an estimated 7.3% ratio and would need $35 billion to meet the 9.5% capital reserve requirement. Bank of America would need $68 billion and Citigroup $48 billion to reach the 9.5% target.

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Axel Weber, former head of the Bundesbank, did economic and monetary research at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he received his doctorate. He joined the economics faculty at the University of Bonn in 1994. This is unlike others in central banking who rose through finance ministries or national central banks. He was made head of the Bundesbank in 2004. He resigned recently after expressing his dissent when the ECB made the decision to buy the government bonds of Greece and other financially troubled eurozone countries. In his view the ECB should stick to its mandate for setting monetary policy and not get involved in fiscal policy. He returned to academia and will teach central banking at the University of Chicago till May 2012. He brings an unconventional approach by his willingness to talk to the media and express his dissent over issues that affect Europe and the global financial system. The same informal style he adopted in teaching and engaging in discussion at the University of Bonn. See the interview in the Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2011....

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A study published in the British journal Lancet shows that the number of people suffering from diabetes went from 153 million in 1980 to 353 million in 2008. The study shows the U.S. having 24.7 millon diabetics in 2008, which is three times the number from 1980. About 70% of this is from population growth and aging, and the rest from obesity, lack of exercize, changing diet. The American Diabetes Association estimated the cost of treating diabetes in the U.S. at $174 billion for 2007. About 138 million diabetics live in China and India. In India there is an additional cause- malnutrition in early childhood years for the poorer segment of the population. European countries have done better than the U.S., Mexico, India and China. S. Korea and Thailand have done better than other Asian countries. And this is attributed to healthier lifestyles, diet and less obesity in these countries.

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Troops who served in Konar province near the Pakistan border saw some of the heaviest fighting in Afghanistan. Here they give their account of what they saw and why there is a big gap in what they saw and what military officers and President Obama are telling Americans. Fort Campbell is spread out over 100,000 acres on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Tweny thousand troops from this base served in Afghanistan. Brigades of the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell fought some of the toughest battles in the eastern part of Afghanistan even while the surge concentrated troops in the southern part near populated centers. What the troops remember is battles fought in remote valleys where troops came out of nowhere like "ghosts," in areas which were held only for a few months and abandoned with no idea what they had accomplished. This description also fits with the reality of the Taliban being both Pakistani and Afghan in the sense that the borders were defined by the British during colonial times, but the tribes of the Pashtun region are on both sides, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. To subdue the region would be to subdue the Pakistani side and the support they enjoy in large parts of Pakistan, with the large and mountainous terrain making movement difficult. Which is why these troops talk about "ghosts" turning up from nowhere and find the fighting to have lost meaning in terms of purposes it is supposed to accomplish and how this is to be done. The reality of the valleys and hills over a vast mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the people and fighting there does not fit the speeches made by President Obama on Afghanistan, and say soldiers this gap is widening every day....