LyrArc Article Gist
Pakistan faces need for new IMF loans of $6-8 billion, says this report in NYT. A new government assumes office with difficult economic conditions.

LyrArc Article Gist
The jobs situation in the US as the stimulus fades, the lack of support for a new stimulus effort. The lack of job creation in the private sector, and the loss of jobs at the state and local government level because of budget deficits. The overdependence on the Fed and the lack of adequate mechanisms for the Fed to be really effective.

LyrArc Article Gist
Gerard Baker in The Times of London looks at California as some kind of dystopia, a malfunctioning place with rolling blackouts from PG&E the electricity company, drought and water shortages, housing costs soaring making it affordable only to the few at the top, and high taxes. He cites an expert from Chapman University who compares it to some sort of medieval feudal place run by nobility at the top, the investors, lawyers and people in entertainment, with the academy and the media as a kind of clerisy who propagate the ideas that this nobility supports, a small middle and the rest as serfs or minimum wage workers in logistics, retail and farms. Median costs of housing are about $613,000, and the affordability index of people who can afford housing is 32% compared to 56% in the country. Hispanic immigrants now prefer Texas, though with a loss of 6 million people in the last decade and gain of five million, it sees increase in population with high birthrates from the existing population to about 40 million. Half the population of homeless in the U.S. are now in California though it has only one eighth the population of the country. High housing costs and high cost of living hurt people at the low end, the lower middle and the retired the most. With low wages at the bottom and extremes of wealth, homeless, housing zone restrictions, drought and rolling electricity blackouts, this is not what the future should look like.  ...