• Does poverty create terrorists? If the answer rests with statistical correlations, one’s perspective has much to do with how the data are manipulated.

Incredibly, Donald Rumsfeld compares the current situation in Iraq, ruled by a occupying foreign military power that is widely despised, to the US in the years following American Revolution (WSJ). (A closer analogy would be the years preceding the Revolution).

Here is the report mentioned in the blog by Robert Blumen. It is issued by HSBC and written by Stephen King and Ian Morris. 

The Economist has run a major section examining the housing bubbles that are popping up around the world.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front-page story focusing on the question, “Why does this recovery feel so much like a recession?” ($). It is a question that has perplexed some of the economics professions’ leading macro theorists who predicted months ago that a recovery would be well under way by now. Says the NBER’s Robert Hall: “It seemed like the timing [of the recovery] was immanent.”

I wish to elaborate on an article that was blogged by Jeff Tucker (Inflation, not deflation, is the real danger  (Fin Times).  This article has a very Austrian flavor, and aroused my curiousity about the author.  I wonder if he is a closet Austrian. I quote a little bit of it here. 

Writes columnist James Pinkerton: Once upon a time, conservatives opposed God-playing hubris. The Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, wrote a book titled “The Fatal Conceit.” And what was that “fatal conceit”? It was the idea that “man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.” Hayek was no enemy of progress - which is achieved, he argued, through the trial-and-error experiments of the marketplace.

Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs in the Boston Globe: Our government is going broke. The feds face bills that are far beyond our capacity to pay — by $44 trillion to be precise. The longer we ignore them, the bigger they get. Yet President Bush is working overtime to deepen our fiscal trap. This $44 trillion figure is not ours. Nor is it some other academics’ calculation.

Sean Corrigan writes: In a study of Britons’ savings habit (‘What saving habit?’ you might well ask!), Sainsbury’s Bank said that while people were generally advised to save between 10 and 15 per cent of their income, their research had found that the 12.4 million people who are in full-time work were saving just 4.7 per cent, while the 3.7 million part-time workers were putting aside barely 3 per cent.