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Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 83% owned by the British government, reported a net loss of 1.99 billion pounds for the second quarter of 2012. Much of the loss comes from a 3 billion pounds accounting charge for the rising value of the company's debt.

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Christopher Power talks to three former IMF officials. If offered the Greece portfolio at the IMF, Simon Johnson, (a former IMF official) says he would ask for a transfer to Iceland, because Greece is incredibly complex, with the IMF unlikely to impose conditions. Especially with IMF chief Dominique Strauss Kahn's aspirations to become President of France. The ECB controls Greek monetary policy and there is no chance of a devaluation with the Greeks in the euro currency. This leaves Greece locked into an unsustainable currency rate. Kenneth Rogoff and Michael Mussa, both agree that the IMF can help buy time for Greece with bridge loans and laying a framework for confidence. Mussa points to the Greek problem- the credit markets won't buy their bonds forever and at the same time its a nasty business to have a sovereign default in the euro currency area. Mussa sees the situation as much like that of GM. Bush bought time for an orderly transition should GM have to declare bankruptcy, which is what happened under Obama. With the European recovery weak, Portugal and Spain fragile, an orderly arrangement is critical not to upset markets. Its like kicking the can down the street, says Mussa, but that can have some advantages. ...

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RBS announced extra provisions for legal issues and settlements of 3 billion pounds in Jan 2014. RBS is also taking impairment charge of 4-4.5 billion pounds for an internal "bad bank" to cover losses from the 2008 financial crisis.

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The Labor Department report shows U.S. nonfarm payrolls increasing by 165,000 in April 2013, and the unemployment rate declining to 7.5%. The housing and auto sectors showed gains. Private sector jobs increased by 176,000, and government jobs showed losses of 11,000. Professional and business services sectors added 73,000 jobs, including 31,000 temporary workers.

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Different visions of primary education, one from the Cambridge Primary Review, and the other from Sir Jim Rose, for children in the UK. Sir Jim Rose thinks there is a lot of overcrowding of subjects in primary education or curriculum overload, and wants to go back to a core curriculum, computer skills, a foreign language, and replace the 12 subjects taught with 6 crosscutting areas of learning. Cambridge Review doesn't see overcrowding as the problem but the lack of good quality teaching of subjects outside the narrow diet of numeracy and literacy. They don't like the dumbing down to core subjects and want to see a broad, rich and balanced curriculum. The Government is following Sir Jim Roses's report as it has been commissioned by the government and is written by one government report writer. By contrast the Cambridge Primary review is independently conceived and has been years in its preparation and draws on international experience and many experts. They are both very different in their perspectives. This is too important an issue, the educational upbringing of a whole new generation of children, to be left to a kind of random selection without discussion of the different views and their merits. ...

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Questions being addressed to get health care to the uninsured and to all Americans at an affordable level.

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India's robust debate as a democracy is of an astonishing size and diversity of opinion. The debate did not diminish when there was one federal party in many states under Indira Gandhi (1970's). It actually increased many times during this period compared to the period under Jawaharlal Nehru (1950's) taking the example of one state Gujarat as an example of what was going on in 18 states of that time. Newspapers in Gujarati such as Jansatta, Gujarat Samachar and others carried on a vigorous debate with opposing points of view to the Indira Gandhi government at the state and federal level of the 1970's. Most people in places like New York and London fail to understand or see the local language newspapers or are totally unaware of their existence, and the debate carried on in their pages. So that they falsely assume what a small group of English language newspapers tell them about the vigor of Indian democratic debate that is truly unmatched anywhere in the world. And in terms of its 22 languages in one nation one could say in the entire history of the world. Swapan Dasgupta in the Times of India gives the staggering number of publications today in 2023- 144,520 publications reaching 386 million people every day. And 392 television news channels . All in 22 languages. To ignore the local languages as if they did not exist is to ignore India as if a billion people did not exist. Or as it is for China to say that everything written in Chinese papers and Chinese news channels did not exist. Dasgupta also points out that one should take Mr. Modi and the BJP out of this as at the national level its a 10 year old phenomenon. Look back from 2010 for the sixty years from 1950 to 2010 and India was as badly misconceived, misrepresented, and misperceived back then. India he says fell from 105th place in Freedom House rankings in 2006 to 140th place in 2013. Mr. Modi only enters the picture after that. Dasgupta points out the small sample for these ratings 150 respondents and the methodology having missed much if not everything that is needed in a robust democratic debate. There is another aspect which is present which is prominent in New York and London and Washington D.C. and that is that non-alignment is not popular.  One has to see the way Adlai Stevenson running against Eisenhower twice in the 1950's very warmly received Jawaharlal Nehru on his visit to the US and compare it with the way the US perceived India under John Foster Dulles after Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952 to understand this aspect of American perception. Dulles was facing the Soviet Union and the British under Churchill then Macmillan had an equal disdain for Nehru's non alignment and tilt towards the Soviet Union. These root perceptions did not change with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and continued into the 1970's when Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minister and continued non alignment.  India's political alignment after the pandemic is anything but non-aligned. It thinks, acts and lives in a way that is similar to the people of the US and Europe. Not even because it chooses to but because of what it is, coming from being part of its ancient path of Vedanta and Buddhist civilization that is the core Asian experience. It also needs to bring 400 million out of poverty and build the next phase of industrialization and modernization that requires fossil fuels in large quantities at lower prices to sustain its rapid growth. Some of it comes from Russia purely as an economic decision during the pandemic. The Biden administration fully supports India in this task of rapidly growth to meet the aspirations of a mostly young population- sourcing fossil fuels from whichever source that makes sense. To become a key part of the US new supply chain that reverses the overconcentration of the supply chain in China. It can only be said then that Freedom House has the peculiar affliction left behind from the John Foster Dulles period, combined with a bit of arrogance in failing to grasp the central fact of India which is its 22 languages forging one nation- a task nowhere seen in the history of the world. ...

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What were the stories in the Economist magazine that were the most read stories of 2019? Not on president Trump. On Malaysia, China under Jinping, and exodus from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The most read article was on the newly elected president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. The mismanagement of the economy particularly extravagant state spending on the Olympics and soccer stadiums for the World Cup at the expense of basic sanitation services, bus and transport services, health services, led to the result of a majority of Brazilians rejecting the Workers Party and its leader former president Lula. Unfortunately most of the media including the Economist did not draw attention to this gap. During a period in which income from mining with export of iron ore, and soyabeans to China, enabled Brazil to live beyond its means, there was no effort to draw attention to glaring gaps in development of public services such as sanitation, bus services and transport, lack of building infrastructure other than to support mining. Glaring gaps in education and health services made the situation worse. The second most read piece in the Economist  was on March 10th- Malaysia's PM is about to steal an election. Here the Economist magazine joined the Wall Street Journal which originally broke the story on the 1MDB fund and irregularities in Malaysia where a development fund was misused by the government. Najib actually lost that election and the WSJ covered the story of the developments that followed in which Malaysia's new governemnt led by a returning former prime minister in his nineties Mahathir Mohammed, ousted his own protege Mr. Najib.  The third most read piece in the Economist magazine was - How the West got China Wrong.  Unfortunately the Economist magazine and most of the media covered China in the two decade long boom years without covering the other emerging story as well in which Mr. Lighthizer (now president Trump's top trade adviser) and others questioned the huge unsustainable trade surpluses in U.S. trade with China. With the economy facing huge downside risks and rising trade tensions with the U.S. Chinese president Jinping's move to remove the limit on terms in office in the Constitution was considered a shift from the notion that China was likely to turn into a democracy. Mr. Jinping had already completed his first term in office and the anti-corruption campaign, managing the economic boom for a soft landing, was carried out with the central leadership of the party, after the destabilization evident in the early part of Xi Jinping's first term. Much of China's path was predictable and rational behaviour in its national interest, what was not clearly defined or defended was the way the U.S. could sustain the trade deficits that had reached a billion dollars a day. Leading to Mr. Trump seizing on this as an election issue to form a bloc of voters separate from the two main parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. The fifth most read piece was on Oct 11, 2018- the next recession. It pointed out that with low interest rates central banks in the U.S. and Europe and America could not cope effectively with a recession. The sixth most read piece was on June 29, 2018- Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism. It cited Prof. David Graeber of the London School of Economics, who wrote a short essay that went viral on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to exist, work he called "bullshit jobs". Graeber said people want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that is leading to a positive difference. No. 7, 8, 9, were on Bitcoin, Netflix and programming language Python. No. 10 most read was on Aug. 30, 2018- Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley. It showed that in 2017 more people left the county of San Francisco than entered. The main reason the cost of living was burdensome and out of control. As Amazon shifts attention to India and Brazil, and Apple pulls back from India, social media companies coming under fire for disinformation, this period of Tech is making way for a shift in a new direction. A direction that focuses on people's lives, wages, spending on much needed infrastructure and services. ...

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The severity of the unemployment problem in the US shows up in the number of long-term unemployed. The long-term unemployed- those who are out of work for 27 weeks or more- are now at least 6 million people, or two out of every five unemployed workers. After the 2001 recession the number of long term unemployed reached 2 million, which shows the vast difference in this recession. Those out of work for 99 weeks or longer were 1.5 million in November, seven times as many as before the recession.

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In this exceptional report of the housing market in Roanoke, Virgina, Neil Irwin talks to builders, home buyers, renters and young people. San Francisco and Washington D.C. are the exception in housing markets- hundreds of America's midsize cities like Roanoke are seeing smaller rates of household formation leading to a decline in demand for single family homes and fewer homes being built. This accounts for a large part of the smaller growth in U.S. GDP. There are he points out about 2.3 million missing households as a result of a significant change in home buying patterns that is reducing demand for new construction of single family homes. During the period 2001-2006, before the 2008 global financial crisis, the rate of new U.S. household formation was about 1.35 million annually. This dropped to 569,000 in 2007-2013, as the effects of the crisis were felt in a deep recession. One result is more young people are postponing buying a house and living with their parents. Faced with large student debt- the total U.S. student debt passed $1 trillion for the first time recently- purchases of homes are becoming more dfficult. Of 18-34 year olds 27% lived with their parents before 2006, according to Labor Department data. This went up to 31% following the recession. Lack of good jobs is another factor. In 2014 March only 63% of 18-24 year olds had jobs. Even young people older than 24 with jobs felt it necessary to save money by living with their parents. More retirees too are moving into apartments....

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  As policies moderate, and policy action delivers results such as stopping the war on Ukraine, rebuilding the US Navy, and trade that brings back jobs, fentanyl deaths near zero with CMC (Canada, Mexico and China) forced to stop fentanyl flows, the small slippage in DJT support from federal workers in Republican districts and losses to business from wide deportation could reverse. DJT's first 100 days with strong action from the start, given the 2 year window before a possible Democrat takeover of the House and letting out the frustration on border policies of the Biden administration, are taking the Nation by surprise. Immigration policy on illegal migration is supported generally in the US except where it reduces customers to small businesses for fear of deportation such as occupational therapy.  Government employees who voted for DJT are uncertain about their jobs and are a group that is taken aback by the speed and action on cutting the government federal bureaucracy of 2 million workers. Many federal workers are spread out in the 51 states and many are in Republican or Republican leaning districts. With some slippage DJT approval is now at 47%, and slightly higher disapproval at 51%. As a result these two groups are moving away from supporting DJT in the first 100 days. Some who still support him outside these two groups are expressing disapproval of action coming this early and forcefully, yet support the overall policy agenda on immigration and cutting spending. There is also a small yet vocal group that supported RFK Jr. and this group remains energized by his promise to take action on health. Others who wanted strong action on immigration to reverse errors of Biden policies for illegal migrant entry and dispersal across America remain committed to DJT policy.  ...

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Thirty minutes after trading started at the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Jan. 6, 2016, circuit breaker mechanisms were triggered following a decline of 7%. This followed a similiar circuit breaker trigerring on Jan. 4, 2016. This time investor anxiety was over a devaluation of the renminbi by the government. This triggered a drop of 3.5% in Germany's DAX index and 2.2% in the S&P 500 index. Faulty communication and confusing signals to markets by the central bank PBOC, and securities regulator CSRC, also played a part in increasing investor anxiety. Similiar problems were seen in summer 2015.

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Opinion polls in late July 2015 showed Syriza with support of 33% from Greek voters, well ahead of other parties. After accepting the third EU bailout following a "no" vote in a referendum in early July, prime minister Tsipras still remains popular in Greece. On August 20, Tsipras announced snap elections to win a new mandate to implement the program of cuts that enabled Greece to get 96 billion euros in the third bailout program. Some members of his own party remain opposed to the bailout, and Tsipras relied on opposition parties support to get approval of the bailout in the Greek parliament.

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Prime Minister Naoto Kan says Japan needs to reverse its policy on nuclear power and gradually phase out nuclear power. He told a televised news conference: " We should aim to have a society that does not rely on nuclear power. In the future, we should have a society that can carry on without nuclear reactors." Nuclear energy provides about 30% of Japan's energy supply. Saying that the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster has changed his thinking about nuclear power, he added: "I have come to realize that this is a technology that cannot be controlled by previous safety measures."

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Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers, was arrested on July 17, 2011. Sir Paul Stephenson, head of Scotland Yard resigned the same day. Stephenson says he did not reveal information to No. 10 Downing Street that Wallis, a former top editor of News World, was also on Scotland Yard's payroll as a special advisor. Stephenson said: " I did not want to compromise the prime minister in any way by revealing or discussing a potential suspect who clearly had a close relationship with Mr. Coulson." Britain's prime minister Cameron hired Coulson from News World as his communications advisor.

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The wildly political nature of the events following spending cuts by Republican Governor Walker is seen in the recall elections for 6 Republican and 2 Democratic legislators. Only four such recall elections were held in Wisconsin in all the years since 1926, showing the extent to which the state is divided on the cuts and the rhetoric preceding the cuts. Interest is being shown from outside the state by unions and other interest groups on both sides. As part of the campaign about $30 million is being spent by outside groups filling the airwaves all the way into Minnesota.

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The Romney plan calls for putting a cap on federal spending at 20% of GDP. It is now over 23% of GDP. The Huntsman plan calls for lowering taxes for corporations and individuals, and eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. This would be offset in the Huntsman plan by closing the mortgage deduction for loans over $500,000, and ending the child tax credit and other tax expenditures as recommended by the Bowles-Simpson Commission. Rep Bachmann and Governor Perry call for eliminating the taxes on American companies repatriating revenues from overseas back to the U.S.

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New rules for euro currency nations in Sept. 2011. The rules provide for sanctions against countries with budget deficits exceeding 3% of GDP, and national debt exceeding 60% of GDP. Countries that break the rules will be required to make a cash deposit in a non-interest bearing account for an amount that is 0.2% of GDP. If the situation continues the deposit becomes a fine. The European Commission will still require finance ministers permission to impose sanctions, but the voting system makes this harder to block. The European Parliament will consider 6 pieces of legislation to make these changes.