Today’s Wall Street Op-ed from noted MIT and Nobel laureate Peter Diamond and UC Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, sums up nicely what is wrong with liberal economics. OK, it’s a long-ish article on marginal tax rates so it doesn’t nicely sum up anything. Instead it smacks you over the [...]

THEY barely dare say it, but the doctors are strangely confident: after a long illness, the euro may be recovering. This week’s all-night surgery by finance ministers to excise a festering lump of Greek debt went better than expected. “We have put in place almost all of the elements we [...]

The health care overhaul that President Obama intended to be the signature achievement of his first term instead has become a significant problem in his bid for a second one, uniting Republicans in opposition and eroding his standing among independents. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of the nation’s dozen top battleground [...]

If you were a president who for three years presided over an economy with more than 13 million unemployed, a growth rate gasping around 2%, an historic credit downgrade and underwater home mortgages drifting like icebergs toward the American Titanic, what would you do? You’d do what Barack Obama’s done: [...]

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period. Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by [...]

President Obama’s budget for 2013 is pure Obama. How do we know? Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, was once asked how to become a budget expert. “You have to read the budget,” he said. To know Obama, it’s similar. You have to read the speeches and look over [...]

“I HAVE learnt that marathon is indeed a Greek word.” Thus spoke Olli Rehn, the European monetary affairs commissioner, at the end of a 14-hour negotiating session that produced a second bailout package for Greece this morning. This had been agreed in principle at a European summit in July last [...]

Rioters torched shops and offices, with banks and foreign businesses the main targets. Pensioners wearing gas masks joined a blockade of Parliament and squared off against some 4,000 police officers. The city’s best-known cinema was burned to the ground, along with nine other national-heritage sites. This was Athens on Sunday [...]

THE banners at the entrance to the Bank of Greece museum in Athens promise a “fascinating journey through Greece’s modern economic and monetary history”. How could any passer-by resist? Inside the museum ranks of glass cases enclose an array of coins and old bank notes, as well as the paraphernalia [...]

The world economy is slowing sharply, and the euro region is headed for recession this year, the International Monetary Fund predicted Tuesday in a bleak update of global conditions. Overall, the world economy is expected to expand 3.25 percent in 2012 — down from the 4 percent projected by the [...]