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About half of private equity investors have money tied up in zombie funds in 2024 according to JP Morgan Chase. US state and local governments manage about $5 trillion in pension money. Large public pension funds have 14% of their money in private equity. And large corporate pension funds have 13% in private equity. California's worker pension fund will have put more money into its private equity part of its investments than it gets out 8 years in a row. CALPERS and California Teachers Pension funds are funds which have take out loans of 5% to 10% of fund holdings to deal with problems of private equity investment. Pension funds are selling private equity funds takin a hit. At a time when retirees such as teachers and public sector employees are facing cost of living and high healthcare costs they can ill afford such losses showing how widespread capital misallocation is today. 

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Paris Olympics organizers want this to be the smallest footprint on climate at 1.58 million metric tons of CO2. This is half that in 2012 London Olympics of 3.4 and 20% less than in Tokyo Olympics of 1.96. No rhetoric, actual facts is the goal even with 13 million spectators from many countries.

It was an opportunity for us to stage this Games in a different way, both for us to prove that the Games can be done differently, but also to leave a legacy,” says Georgina Grenon, Paris 2024’s director of environmental excellence." It is not that difficult to get 50% cut in emissions by using wood or low carbon cement. New construction is a big source of emissions. Paris organizers plan to use existing or temporary infrastructure, and also reuse what is built, and build some facilities in underserved deprived areas to use later for affordable housing. It is a remarkable and commendable effort.

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Senator John Thune of South Dakota who had the support of Senators Daines and Mullin, and of retiring Republican Minority Leader won in a 3 way race against John Cornyn of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida. Scott of Florida had support of the MAGA allies of DJT. His liability was the way he had run the party as head of the Congressional campaign of 2022 with poor results. DJT stayed aloof from the race only saying he expected the Senate leader to defer to his policy for Ukraine.

Thune won 29 votes to 24 for Cornyn. His way of running the senate will be more open than Mitch McConnell's, getting more feedback from Senators, and more open to amendments. Priorities are securing the border and reauthorizing the tax cuts.

Thune seems a good choice so that the president gets to hear views of all members in the Senate and is well informed to make decisions.

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The Des Moines Register Selzer polling track record for 2004-2024 is shown here for Iowa.  Over 20 years Des Moines Register and Selzer are shown to have a close understanding of this state in the heartland of America.

Over 20 years only in 2004 Bush vs Kerry when it polled for Kerry 5 points ahead and the result Bush up by less than 0.7 percentage point. In that one Bush worked hard into the last hours with support of evangelicals. In all over 20 years Des Moines Register got it close to the final result.

Between 1984 to 2004- Reagan was the last Republican to win in Iowa.

Popular three time Governor Tom Vilsack was Secretary of Agriculture under president Biden and the most respected member of his cabinet. Vilsack was given full support and funding by Biden for renewal of Rural and Agricultural America.

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Anxieties about illegal immigration and cost of living propel Trump to a win in the 2024 presidential elections. He wins more votes from younger people, from rural voters, and from Latinos, black people without a college degree. 

Paradoxically the end of the pandemic, vaccines, and improvement in health care may have led to voters focusing on the cost of living as an element that was not tackled under the Biden administration. Housing and grocery costs were allowed to surge and tech monopolies operated as before. Even union leaders were not fully convinced about Democratic support because of the changes in the Democratic party since Clinton. 

A general sense of unease about immigration was not tackled early on in the Biden administration first 2 years when the surge from Venezuela became evident following the collapse of its economy. 

 

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Krugman says crypto currency has become a huge, really huge player in campaign finance. He says it accounts for almost half of corporate spending on political action committees PAC's in 2024 election year in the US. He calls it startling that this is happening even though crypto currency destroys value. Krugman says crypto is not like fossil which is doing the same thing getting people to deny climate change yet with benefits from using fossil as a transition fuel, crypto not being a real industry at all.

Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman is clear that it has dangers for the American economy-

He says crypto rests on nothing but a perception that some day there might be a genuine use for these products. That we do not know when the government gets serious about regulating crypto marketing practices and policing its criminal uses. And adds that much of the $2 trillion in crypto may simply evaporate.

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After hurricane Helene only about 10% of FEMA workers are available for Hurricane Milton headed towards the Tampa Bay Area at 175 miles per hour.

Christopher Flavelle of NYT  points out FEMA desperately needs more funding and staff as it is responding simultaneously to many disasters. The full effects of climate change in more and more natural disasters all across the US have not been taken into account for the added funding and staffing needed. In this situation FEMA is spread thin causing other problems such as attrition and burnout and unfilled positions.

The Government Accountability Office report found in 2023 that 35% of FEMA's positions were unfilled, because of “rising disaster activity during the year, which increased burnout and employee attrition.”

There are also lot of people who are out of work in disaster areas who can be pulled in for disaster work.  

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Lois Boisson of France No.361 makes it to final 4 at the French Open, Roland Garros 2025. She entered as a wild car invitation and beat Jessica Pegula No. 3 on the clay courts.

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Sanger and Broad offer an assessment of progress in controlling nuclear proliferation and improving security during the two terms of U.S. president Obama. Obama took particular interest in this field as Senator. Today countries such as Belgium, Pakistan, are considered sources of potential problems in nuclear security. Urban security for nuclear materials is a priority. Japan, China, Pakistan and India have not reduced their nuclear materials stockpiles in Asia, and Russia refused to participate in the Nuclear Summit in 2016, led by the U.S. Problems are urgent to secure nuclear materials from terrorists and require high priority from world leaders. Pakistan has moved towards smaller tactical nuclear weapons which creates additional problems of security.

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The Spanish women's soccer team's Hermoso unauthorized football kiss by a football official leads to this trial in Spain Feb. 2025. It was a point of much disapproval worldwide and in Spain, with Spanish footballers very critical of the official's attitudes to women soccer players.

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World Expo in Osaka-Kansei in Japan opened April 13, 2025 exceeds 10 million visitors in July 2025. An Air Show by Blue Impulse of the Self Defense Forces of Japan on July 13 is shown in the Asahi Shimbun. The goal for this world's fair ignored by most of the official media is 28.2 million visitors with 158 countries and regions participating.

The theme of this world's fair is “Designing Future Society for Our Lives.” The song is “Kono Hoshi no Tsuzuki wo”, by Kobukuro, it means Let's go see the future.The future society is one that would be inclusive, innovative and sustainable after covid.

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Noise at 90 decibels at 2 Taylor Swift concerts at Real's Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, Spain, and complaints in 2024 led to action to stop the noise. Above 55 decibels is considered not safe.

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Colombia's 2018 presidential election has  a young right wing candidate Duque, 41 years who worked as economist at Inter American Development Bank and supports Alvaro Uribe, a strong critic of the 2016 peace agreement with guerillas that ended the drug and guerilla violence. On the other side is a former guerilla Mr. Petro, who was mayor of Bogota from 2012 to 2015. Petro says he supports rules of democracy. About 5000 refugees leave Venezuela each day, most of them coming to Columbia, according to the United Nations. This poses a major problem for the next government.

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The election of her close ally Kramp-Karrenbauer to head of the CDU party, protects Merkel's position as Chancellor till her retirement in 2020. Karrrenbauer is to the right of Merkel on social issues and to the left on economic matters. She is likely to take a different view on the migration policy that has let the CDU ratings drop and produced poor election results. The move stabilizes the CDU led government. Karrenbauer will try to rebuild relations with the party's conservative wing through her conservative views on social issues.

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Coronavirus infections peak in Spain by April 4 and the number of deaths at 809 in one day is a drop from earlier in the week. Madrid is hit hard. The number of infections in one day dropped from 7472 to 7026 on Saturday April 4. Officials are looking for ways to get masks for all citizens as a way to prepare for an eventually ease restrictions. It is virtually impossible to get masks in Spain. Lockdown has been extended to April 25. 

Masks are mandatory in Austria, Czech Republic, Israel and Turkey.

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Apple iWatch sales are about 11 million -15 million units in last 4 quarters. The iWatch sales are a small fraction of sales overall. Apple quarterly profit declines by 22.5%, as revenue declines and iPhone sales decline. Half of the quarterly revenue decline comes from China. This has hurt the share price by May 2016.

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With domestic oil consumption growing at 10% a year, and the Arab Spring leading to increased subsidies and social spending, the Saudis are looking at nuclear power to generate some of the supply of electricity. Saudi Arabia expects to have no reserve margin of supplies by 2020 at current levels of domestic consumption. In 2011 the Saudi government setup the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, or KA-CARE, for coming up with nuclear energy policies. KA-CARE has an agreement with French supplier AREVA.

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The CUP party repudiates the leadership of Arturo Mas following a corruption scandal in the Catalonia ruling party Convergence. Convergence led by Mas is losing support in the state in 2016.

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Thomas Bach is a German fencing athlete who won the Olympic Gold medal. He is from Wurzburg, Germany and was elected in 2013, in office as International Olympic Committee president till 2025. In the new election in 2025 Bach supported Coventry of Zimbabwe, a winner of the gold medal in swimming for the job, over a candidate from Spain whose father Samaranch held the same job, and COE a candidate from Britain. Other candidates were from Japan and France. The process of voting and the people voting is not representative of the world's people. As countries such as Germany and Spain are dominant. Britain and France, China and India have never elected a representative from their country as IOC president in the 20th century or the 21st. IOC presidents are there for long periods, as long as 20 years. Avery Brundage of the US was IOC president from 1952-1972  for 20 years followed by Morris of Ireland for 7 years. Following this in 1980 another 20 year term for a Spanish businessman Antonio Samaranch, whose son tried to run in 2025. In 2001 12 years for a Belgian Jacques Rogge, followed by another 12 years for German Thomas Bach.  In 20th century no one from France or Greece, no one from India or China has been elected IOC president and the election process is an insider's affair, even thought the games are watched in China, India and other parts of the world by hundreds of millions of people. ...

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The benchmark price of U.S. crude oil dropped to $31.41 a barrel on January 11, 2016, as oil prices continued to drop sharply following a slowdown in China, appreciation in the U.S. dollar and no cuts in production from Saudi Arabia. Analysts expect a crisis for energy producers that is deeper than ones in 1986, and five plunges in oil price all the way back to 1970. With the oil prices at $30 and expected to drop below $30, the companies that took on a lot of debt have no choice but to keep up production. In the process many may find themselves in bankruptcy. Private equity with capital of $100 billion is likely to come in at this point to buy cheap assets without the debt, say analysts. U.S. banks energy portfolios are small, with Wells Fargo energy exposure only 2% for oil and gas loans in the third quarter of 2015, or about $17 billion. Loans that are rated "sub-standard. doubtful or loss," are projected at 15% of loans to energy producers, about $34.2 billion, in a biannaual review by banking regulators. The unusual aspect of this energy price slump is that production is not declining with falling prices- oil production in the U.S. was estimated by the government at 9.2 million barrels a day in Jan 2016- 1% higher than at the beginning of 2015 when prices were over $40 a barrel....

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Growth is back in the eurozone. The OECD estimates 2.1% growth in 2017 and 1.9% growth in 2018 for the eurozone countries. Business investment is up significantly- up 5.7% in the first half of 2017. Worldwide business investment in 2016 was at 1.3 trillion euros, up 7.2% from the prior year, according to Eurostat.

New investment for electric vehicles in the auto industry is also up significantly in an industry that provides 10% of all jobs in manufacturing. Yet business investment is only half of what it needs to be- to makeup 5% of GDP- to spur good job creation, says this report in the WSJ. Use of automation is also limiting the number of jobs created. Real wage growth is also lacking.

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Scientists say 6out of 9 global climate resilience boundaries have been crossed. It is based on 2000 studies and published in the journal Science Advances. Broken boundaries means the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed, from the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, to the start of the Industrial Revolution, says Damian Carrington in The Guardian. We are outside of safe operating space say scientists. Prof. Johan Rockstrom, is head of the Stockholm Resilience Center, who developed the boundaries framework. He says more worrisome than all the extreme climate events we are seeing is the dwindling planetary resilience. For fresh water in lakes and rivers and soil it was crossed earlier in the 20th century. Synthetic pollution from plastic waste in 2022. Nitrogen and phosporous, according to FAO 3 times safe levels added every year. For air pollution it was crossed in South Asia and China. Planetary boundaries is combined with social justice issues in a May assessment so that pro development policies to help the poor can be combined with major investment in climate change action. ...

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The sense of conflict in China and US relations may not have developed in the shaping of Xi Jinping's thinking till the emergence of Mr. Trump. Jinping comes into the China shaped by Deng and Zemin after the collapse of the purely Communist experiment with modernization without access to western technologies and capital, and the experiment with American help. It is only after the realization that the Communist party had lost its sense of purpose in these years leading to the Bo Xilai episode, and the rhetoric of Mr. Trump against China, that the idea of first friction and then conflict emerged. The initial idea for Jinping before Trump was that this has worked for China- the experiment with the cooperation of the US in modernizing China. Trump's rhetoric and the Republican party's rhetoric about China stealing American jobs and technology after 2015 may have been targeted to win the election but it had an unintended effect after the tariffs of shaping Jinping's thinking about the future for China. Between the Bo Xi Lai episode in 2012 when it appeared he would be attempting to manipulate the Communist party's direction in unknown and unpredictable ways, Bo's trial in 2013 and the anticorruption campaign and the 2015 election campaign of Mr. Trump in the US, there must have been much soul searching in the party that shaped Jinping's thinking about the future for China after all the tumult of the 20th century starting with the Boxer rebellion in 1901. Stability is highly prized in China particularly for modernization. This perspective is important to grasp for world peace to be preserved with different coexisting perspectives about the world based on national as well as shared interests in issues such as climate change. US after its own disastrous experiment with capitalism that led to widening inequality of the kind not seen since Lincoln in the 1850's, the 2009 crisis, and the shift of jobs to China under a purely capitalist idea of how economies should function, had its own national interests in jobs, local manufacturing and Made in the USA. Once this process was underway after 2016 and grasped by president Biden after 2020, and supply chain reconstruction made the goal after covid, the US and China were on divergent economic and political paths.   That rethinking by Xi Jinping is not over as it may still be going on. The war in Ukraine may even convince Jinping and China's No. 2 leader Li Keqiang who studied the US constitution and American urbanization under mentors when he was in college, that Russia's prolongation of the war in Ukraine does not serve the interests of China. That risking relations with the European Union as Russia prolongs the war and finds itself in the complex problems of  a war it started, is not in China's interests in setting its own course for the future. ...

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A former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, says a recession is likely in the U.S. as interest rates rise. He sees interest rates on 10 year Treasury  notes rising from about 3% to 5%, as the Fed pushes the short term rate from today's 2% to a projected 3.4% in 2020. As short term interest rates go up he sees equity prices reflecting historic P/E ratios for stocks. This would lead to a significant drop in share prices and drop in consumer spending, drop in business investment, and a drop in GDP of 2%. 

Because of huge deficits as publicly held federal debt rises from 75% to 100% by 2020, there is less room for fiscal intervention and help through public spending, and with short term rates at around 3% less room to cut rates. This means, says Feldstein, that a new recession would last longer.

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Joe Biden says in the Wash. Post Jan 6, that what happened on this day Jan 6 2021- that "we cannot allow the truth to be lost."

"Four years later, leaving office, I am determined to do everything I can to respect the peaceful transfer of power and restore the traditions we have long respected in America. The election will be certified peacefully. I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon.But on this day, we cannot forget. This is what we owe those who founded this nation, those who have fought for it and died for it.And we should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed."