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Actually, in many ways, Wall Street benefits from the big public sector unions. The states’ enormous, albeit inadequate, pension assets are invested in equities and other exotic instruments peddled by Wall Street. Historically, government workers paid for more security, with lower wages. In exchange for smaller salaries they got job security and generous benefits. Eventually, they began to see their security as a right. With salaries matching private sector now, It seems government workers are now getting the better deal. Taxpayers are explicitly on the hook to make sure these contracts are honoured.

Once upon a time, America had a relatively good system for dealing with displaced workers. But the shallowness of its recessions and the rapidity with which employment tended to spring back led to complacency and neglect of these institutions. In Europe, by contrast, governments responded to persistent high unemployment with a wave of labour market reforms and investments in retraining and other measures to return workers to the labour force. Recent jobless recoveries have therefore left the American economy with a declining participation rate, while Europe has done better. Growth in trade with China contributes to the closure of the local textile mills, which significantly damages the local economy. The most skilled workers then leave; they can do better in growing towns nearby, and they probably have the financial resources to relocate. The low-skill workers left behind do not move. Why? Well, they may not be able to afford to do so, but other factors make staying in place more at...

President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later. Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed. Continue reading the main story Recipe for Success 1. Contrasts 2. Three-part lists 3. Contrasts combined with lists 4. Alliteration 5. Bold imagery 6. Audience analysis He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address such a hit. Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more tha...

While the U.S. has a reserve of 9,200 tonnes of gold, China has 1,054 tonnes and India 565 tonnes.   Indians sit on an estimated 18,000 tonnes. India has always had the largest gold reserve with individuals.  It was $424 an ounce in 1990 before crashing to $255 in 2001

It has to break up...  We cant have a single monetary union with wildly different fiscal policies..  n starkly contrasting nature of economies...   peripheral countries ought to float their own currency at a much lower rate than euro and increase their productivity...   u cant subject them 2 years of frugality n austerity ie internal devaluation... of course german exports will be adversely impacted but the alternative looks worse..  there is going to be chaos..  whichever path we take...  we should desist from competitve devaluation if we have multiple currencies...

It has become a rolling crisis..  Everytime you put out a fire somewhere, u see that the fire breaks out elsewhere a tad bit later..   We will keep lurching between one to another with severe uncertainty..   Unless our remedies address the core structural problems...   Or our innovations in the main street create a genuine demand...

I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er. As Kenneth Muir writes, "Macbeth has not a predisposition to murder; he has merely an inordinate ambition that makes murder itself seem to be a lesser evil than failure to achieve the crown." At least since the days of Samuel Johnson, analysis of the play has centred on the question of Macbeth's ambition, commonly seen as so dominant a trait that it defines the character. Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled. This opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to Caroline Spurgeon, is supported by Shakespeare himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several  n imisms he applies: His garments seem either too big or too small for him – as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and un...