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The problems that hit the UK economy with the announcement of unfunded tax cuts were worsened by very poor communications, the cavalier attitude of the new Truss government and finance minister Kwarteng, and a lack of experience, says this report in the WSJ.The toxic mix of inflation, higher interest rates particularly in the US, and the conflicting messages from the Conservative party with critics within the Conservatives calling the step misguided, had a strong impact on financial markets. Yields on British government bonds jumped beyond that of Greece and Italy, and the British pound fell with large drops in its value falling to 1.03 to the US dollar. Only the intervention by the Bank of England helped recover the pound to $1.11 and yields that went up from 3.6% to over 5% to drop back down to 3.8%. Many other countries face the same high inflation and rising interest rates in the US, so that poorly managed political situations such as the leadership race in the Conservatives party in the UK can have damaging economic consequences. This is a point of caution for other countries economies and governments says the WSJ. Italy's new government coalition has managed to keep expectations of major changes to policy to the Draghi government to the minimum in anticipation of economic problems that could emerge with differences with the European Union, and to avoid poorly managed communications. This is true of all countries in the world and a reminder of the importance of correct messaging in financial markets, and taking a prudent role of funding extra spending programs. This was also done in the $360 billion Inflation Reduction Act and Climate bill of 2022 by the Biden administration. where the dollar spending was adequately accounted for with policies considered prudent to tackle climate change, support badly impacted segments of society, and new infrastructure. This is a learning lesson for other governments. ...

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President Biden gets his $1.9 trillion aid package through the U.S. Congress with 220 votes for and 211 against. All Democrats except one voted in favor and all Republicans voted against. Earlier the $15 minimum wage was dropped from the bill to get it through the Senate. Also kept were income criteria to prevent the $1400 check to individuals in households going to the most affluent income earners. The Senate vote was close - 50 to 49 in a party line vote. The Biden aid package comes on top of earlier aid under president Trump in 2020. This aid is likely to provide enough stimulus to the US economy to restore growth to levels that were there before the pandemic hit.

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Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza, Greece's second largest party, is interviewed by WSJ's Bret Stephens. Tsipras describes the problems inside Greece. He describes the bribery in healthcare, tax evasion, burden of taxes on the middle class and honest citizens, a large and inefficient bureaucracy. In its current state Greece would build up debt and deficits all over again if the debts were forgiven tomorrow, says Tsipras. He is for Greece remaining in the eurozone. Tsipras understands the problems Germans have with putting money into Greece with the current state of economic management and lack of conscience of its elite, and why they see this as not fair. He suggests as a model for solving the Greece debt crisis, the London Conference of 1953 forgiving half of Germany's debts and putting the rest on a 30 year scheduled repayment. This would have to come with results in cutting bureaucracy, reducing corruption, and efficient tax collection for Greece democracy to work.

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King Charles of Britain is a strong supporter of action against climate change from a young age. Here NYT comments on the odd situation of the Queen's Speech in 2023 in which the King announces the legislative priorities of the government in a speech to parliament. In this case he announced the expansion of oil drilling in the North Sea under the Tory government of Rishi Sunak. Mr Starmer leader of the Labor Party says the Tories under Sunak are doing this because -"they see our country's problems as something to be exploited, not solved." Trailing Labour badly the Conservatives and Sunak are trying to win support by weakening environmental measures by delaying a ban on gasoline cars and lowering targets for replacing gas boilers.

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Interaction with students during Modi's visit to Kerala as he opens the Kochi Water Metro and the first high speed train in Kerala. The train will cover major parts of the state including Thiruvanathapuram, Kottayam, Ernakulam, Kozhikode, Kannur, and Kasargod.

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Republicans in the U.S. are talking about impeachment more than Democrats in tweets, ads and messages they send out. The Democrats are talking about other issues and this is not what you would expect after Democrats voted together on party lines to pass two articles of impeachment of president Trump. Republicans may even use the issue of impeachment in favor of president Trump as the impeachment process moves to the Senate where Republicans are in a majority. Republicans believe president Trump did nothing wrong and may call Senator Biden and his son Hunter Biden to testify in the Senate about activities in Ukraine, say experts.

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With the gradual decline in the second wave of the coronavirus in India, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman highlighted some of the progress and the plan ahead -to achieve macroeconomic stability in the face of coronavirus spending and needs, the progress in GST for formalizing the economy and getting tax compliance, the infrastructure investment and forward looking timely completion of projects, increasing foreign direct investment flows into the economy, and making India an important part of the renewal of supply chains of America and Europe. The highest ever GST, Goods and Services Tax collection, helps build the framework for revenue to support investment in new infrastructure. Ease of doing business in India was a key goal to increase new inflows of foreign investment. Coordination of domestic and foreign trade and investment policy was part of the effort to build the environment for partnering with US and European Union countries, and UK, so that implementation in supply chain renewal could take place. ...

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Approaching euro dollar parity and the weakening currencies in Japan and Britain is the subject of this editorial in the WSJ. The ECB is focused on preventing divergence in bond rates of Germany and Italy more than it is in fighting inflation. The Fed in the US is increasing rates aggressively to curb inflation. This divergence in policies of central banks is making the dollar stronger.

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San Salvador experienced control by gangs in different parts of the country with the highest homicide rate of any country. The country's government has taken the country back from gangs and introduced normalcy to the country where people can walk freely and live freely without fear of gangs. This NYT reports looks at the experience of San Salvador after problems in Mexico and Central American countries.

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Boris Johnson was never for austerity and says this in his new book, yet he failed to make the major investments in the British economy in the way Biden has done in the US, and in some ways has left Labor's Starmer with difficult decisions with the strained budget finances of Britain. Of the investments he protected from John Osborne and his austerity plans as chancellor under Cameron Boris Johnson says- “Those big investments – Crossrail, the Olympic site, the Westfield Centre at Shepherd’s Bush – were fortuitously timed for London: vast counter-cyclical programmes that kept the spades going into the ground and people in work.” This was as Mayor of London in 2016. Of Osborne and Cameron so little is left, and so little came out of the period of austerity other than the failed investments Britain failed to make, simply a lost decade for Britain. And the diversion of Brexit under Johnson not taking Britain to a good place for the standard of living of the British people. Of the intraparty conflicts in the Tories he says Sunak's resignation as chancellor should never have happened calling it "worse than a crime," and a mistake for Sunak, the party, and the country. Johnson says that many days as PM he would come back to No.10 flat, exhausted and working into the evening when he should have been talking to colleagues, MP's to keep them all together. After Sunak's resignation from Boris Johnson's cabinet the Tory Conservatives split further apart, this time in the Boris Johnson faction of the party. Sunak's elevation to prime minister was short lived ending up with the Tories going downhill from there.  On the singular goal that led to the splits- that of Brexit- Johnson has little more to say than that in his travels he had found people wanted more Britain. ...

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Two Harvard economists, Lawrence Summers and Lant Pritchett, say China is likely to revert to the mean of average long term growth of developed countries after this spurt of growth is over. Growth is likely to slow to 6% by 2016, and revert to the mean of 2% for industrialized countries in the long term. Goldman Sachs banker Jim O'Neill, says the growth at a higher rate could be sustained because of urbanization. Summers does not rule out this outcome as he accepts a range of outcomes, with the most likely outcome being a reversion to the mean. The factors often cited for slowing growth are lower of productivity of capital as corruption and close connections determine where capital is allocated, misallocation of capital, large increases in credit in the economy since 2009 leading to bad debt in the financial system, aging society and demographics with increasing numbers of older people. Other reasons are the choices being made by Chinese leaders for slowing down to address the problems of air pollution and contamination of water supplies, inflation in housing prices, overdependence on exports, need to shift to increasing domestic consumer spending but unable to do this with the lack of spending power of large parts of the population because wealth is excessively concentrated in the upper ranks of society. The need to manage these forces ensuring some measure of stability depends on finding ways to reduce the growing concentration of wealth and power, in itself a challenge for the Communist Party elite. A combination of different factors with some still unknown factors are likely to play a part in this reversion to the mean for China, a situation encountered by every country so far in North America, Europe and Japan. This makes it even more important that each developing society structure its development around the most optimal goals with the least costs attached to the development....

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Severe damage to Pakistan's agricultural sector in the monsoon floods of 2022. Half of the cotton crop is destroyed say officials, and large part of the rice crop. The wheat planting is affected at a time when there are shortages of wheat in the world.

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Solar energy manufacturing capacity gets a strong start as the government puts in place the investments and policies to make Indian solar energy modules more competitive than Chinese made modules. This is part of the investment in production India promised at the Glasgow conference on climate change.

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Some 51.5 million women representing 49% of the total of 104 million voters will vote in the December 2018 general election. Yet only 22 were members of parliament in the 350 member parliament. Zobaer Ahmed in DW.com shows how women remain marginalized and underrepresented in Bangladesh government and parliament. The women leaders Hasina and Zia are from influential political families. Hasina's Awami League party has fielded only 25 women for the December election.

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After a long year of frustration with a small faction of 20 Congressmen in the Republican party led by Mr Gaetz Mr. McCarthy is taking on this group as it seeks to oust him from the Speaker's position. He will need Democratic support. This report looks at the changing situation in the US Congress. America needs a bipartisan approach to tackle major problems of infrastructure, climate change, wages and the cost of living, and education. It does not make sense to allow a few members of Congress to thwart the nation's plans to tackle its problems and challenges.

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Li Keqiang, China's new premier, entered Peking University in 1978 by excelling in merit exams. Li and a fellow student, Yang Baikui, translated the English book "The Due Process of Law" by British jurist Lord Denning. Professor Gong Xiangrui, brought the book to China and educated his students in the ideas of constitutional law and western liberalism. Yang says Li learned English on his own and meticulously carried a stack of notecards with English on one side and Chinese translation on the other. Li would study the cards while waiting for a bus or in the line at the school cafeteria. Li has political discusions with students from that time, some of whom joined the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. He is the son of a mid level county official from Anhui province and moved in the party ranks through diligent effort. Li's doctoral thesis is in economcs and he is expected to focus on economic changes, with Xi Jinping, the new president, taking the lead in making changes to the political system. Fellow students from Li's days at Peking University say the difference between them and Li is the pace of democratization, with Li looking at it as a longer process. Recent articles by Li Keqiang on economic change show his emphasis on urbanization as a way to improve agricultural conditions with a smaller number of farmers improving producitvity in agriculture, and the importance of creating a better social safety net for people in China....

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President Zoran Milanovic is reelected president of Croatia with 74% of the vote in Jan 2025. He is supported by Social Democrats party and is critical of the European Union and NATO.

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Complicity of elites is a key question in the Epstein scandal. Even when some of this was known the seriousness of it was ignored by elites. About the Mandelson scandal that is rocking Britain in the beginning of February 2026 with questions for Keir Starmer, it can be said that elites just had too much awe and respect for the major centers in the world of finance or sought ot be part of that world when these centers of finance had themselves lost their sense of purpose in the Nation, as Labour's Mandelson did. In the larger sense of the influence of the financial industry on elites in the events leading to the 2009 financial crisis where the name Bear Stearns comes up repeatedly, of the pharmaceutical industry on elites in 2026, it could be said that the influence on policymaking elites is a pernicious one. As Teddy Roosevelt points out in Chapter 5 of his Autobiography titled Applied Idealism, some elites had too much respect and awe for big financial interests. TR wrote of these elites in his time- "Some of the men foremost in the struggle for Civil Service Reform have taken a position of honorable leadership in the battle for those other and more vital reforms. But many of them promptly abandoned the field of effort for decency when the battle took the form, not of a fight agains the petty grafting of small bosses and small politicians- a vitally necessary battle, be it remembered- but of a fight against the great entrenched powers of privilege, a fight to secure justice through the law for ordinary men and women, instead of leaving them to suffer cruel injustice either because the law failed to protect them  or because it was twisted from its legitimate purpose into a means for oppressing them." ...

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French and European attitudes towards Russia that are part of French German and British history and relations with Russia since 1700 of a constant rivalry and efforts to keep Russia dominating Northern Europe since 1700, or regional rivalry and wars including invasions. This colors most of the perceptions of Russia in Europe as shown in this article in Le Monde. This is in sharp contrast to the US. The US has differences with Russia but has not gone through the European constant rivalry and struggles over 400 years.

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Renewable energy will get a big boost after the Ukraine war but there will be a period of transition during which more fossil fuels are produced in the US, Qatar and other parts of the Middle East to meet demand in Europe in 2022. Europe is working to develop alternative supplies of energy in an effort to move away from dependence on Russian energy.

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The entire campaign could be settled here in North Carolina as Harris with 20 offices in the state, and tens of thousands of more volunteers, the energy of popular two term Roy Cooper Democratic governor of the state, work to get the support of voters in the Raleigh Durham area as well as rural voters in the western parts of the state.

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Britain turns to Labour as the lead for Labour party increases to 27 points after Sunak announces the general election will be held on July 4, 2024. What would a Starmer administration look like and how will it meet the expectations of Britain for generational change after the failure of Brexit, and 14 years of austerity policies that failed to invest in Britain and failed to deliver on infrastructure and housing? These are questions not easily answered as Britain's finances are left in a bad state by the Tories for Labour. Starmer is taking the right approach to first get a grasp of the tremendous challenges facing Labour in this situation. It was easy for Boris Johnson and the Tories to make the promises that were never kept and left the British people in the lurch.

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Redistricting in Texas that may flip 5 Democratic seats in US Congress to Republicans. With population shifts to the south Texas has grown in population in 5 years to 2025 by roughly 2 million from 29 million to 31 million. In 2025 about 40% are Hispanic and 40% White evenly divided, with 11% black and 6% Asian, and 3% other. It remains a conservative state in the South with a focus on faith and on traditional values. Along with Florida and the two Carolinas it remains a major part of the Conservative South.