In recent months financial firms in Britain, including banks and insurers, have announced thousands of lay-offs.

Major British banks have led the way. Barclays announced in February plans to cut 3,700 jobs, while HSBC recently carried out 3,160 lay-offs. Lloyds, 39 percent controlled by the government, announced 550 redundancies in the middle of March after 1,340 positions were eliminated in J

One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the midst of a quagmire with even more pundits angry at him, and with his approval ratings far lower than they are. If he intervenes now, the results might be even worse. Journalists often demand action for action's sake, see

.. imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them. And imagine that these devices upload the data to large-scale commercial enterprises that are able to collect the recordings from each and every American and integrate them together to form a mi

"The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are. It is contrary to our interests and needs to stop," he said.

"Now that is a hard case to make because I think for a lot of Americans the notion is: out of sight, out of mind. And it is easy to demagogue the issue. That's what happened the first time it came u

Why did the invasion of Iraq result in cultural destruction and killings of intellectuals? Convention sees accidents of war and poor planning in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. The authors argue instead that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state to remake it as a client regime. Post-invasion chaos created conditions under which the cultural foundations of the state could be undermined. T

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premi

Why does the Fed need to explain what they are doing now?

Well it isn’t because everything is going just fine. Put it this way. They must figure when you have 50 million people on food stamps and the Dow Jones is going up a few hundred points a week and making all time highs and you have 16 trillion dollars in debt and interest rates are zero, its best to have a communiqué every month before s

In the wake of Thatcher's departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby's daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibilit

With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was vehemently denie

The legend of Thatcher portrays her as a self-made woman, a greengrocer’s daughter from Grantham.

In reality, the emergence of Thatcher was the work of a formidable political syndicate. One of Thatcher’s most important handlers was by any measure Lord Victor Rothschild (1910-1990), the third Baron Rothschild. Lord Vic was nominally a Labour peer in the House of Lords, but much of hi

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff came as close to celebrity status as an economist can ever come, with their book, This Time Is Different. They claimed that 800 years (!) of financial history proves that high government debt ratios lead to low economic growth. Governments all over the world took heed and downsized, adopting austerity that cost millions upon millions of workers their jobs.

But it

A rash of weak manufacturing data from America, Europe and Asia has cast serious doubts on the strength of the global economy and was starkly at odds with surging stock markets in the West.

Markit’s PMI factory index for the US suffered the biggest one-month fall in almost three years as the most sudden fiscal tightening since 1946 starts to bite.

While the gauge remains

F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things.

For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria, fear that unless we slash spending we’ll turn into G

The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans during the boom — the kind that went so wrong during the bust — are busily reviving the same types of investments that many thought were gone for good. Once more, arcane-sounding financial products like collateralized debt obligations are being minted on Wall Street.

The revival partly reflects the same investor optimism that has lif

Richie Havens, who marshaled a craggy voice, a percussive guitar and a soulful sensibility to play his way into musical immortality at Woodstock in 1969, improvising the song “Freedom” on the fly, died on Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 72.

Mr. Havens embodied the spirit of the ’60s — espousing peace and love, hanging out in Greenwich Village and playing gigs from the Isle of Wight t