This week we discovered almost all the cash that was inside the U.S. is now outside the U.S. But guess what we still have in spades? Self-regard. In fact, a recent story in the New Yorker cited young Americans as having some of the lowest maths and English scores in...

There is a time to wear a headband and a time not to wear a headband. Some would say it is best not to wear a headband outside kindergarten. But if you're in Istanbul to consider offering the full thrust of free world legitimacy to the Libyan rebels, why not keep...

Hold the phone, we run of cash when? In two and a half weeks? Bah, fie and tut-tut. So that's what's behind this whole debt-ceiling/deficit talk getting in the way of my "Mad Men" re-runs. But maybe there's a silver lining. One humble query: If our entire nation can...

I remember when I first read about Rupert Murdoch as a kid, how he barnstormed the British media in the 1960s and published anything that might put the nation's panties in a bunch: its journalistic establishment, its finance establishment, its trade union...

It took longer than usual to take up the pen today. Probably because it was imperative to check out the "Every Single Outfit Catherine Wore on the Royal Tour" feature in the Huffington Post. Having done that, I now turn to more important matters. Like this...

As most writers, I am a tiny bit obsessed with music. Apropos of nothing, more than 14 million Americans are now out of work (according to the latest blizzard of stunningly disappointing U.S. Labor Department data released Friday). In the past, we've seen our tired,...

The whole Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair looks like it's coming to a painful close (with even the close itself looking painful in some such terms as, when will it close?). As we look askance, I am trying to ask myself...what have we learned? Not much. Except perhaps...

Not my words, just something an observant Canadian living inside the U.S. had to say today about our country's death match over the debt ceiling -- before remarking that it might be wise to, uh, "back-migrate." Instead of an espresso shot this morning, take a gander...

So, I wrote a book...but I have not been goodly enough to do much blogging about it. This was not intentional. This was mainly because of the furious pace of travel, lawsuits, the odd threat -- and the fact that I was serving full time as a journalism fellow at the...

Many of you have written to ask for a good bit more on the shenanigans prevalent in today's oil market. Check out this show, aired today, from minute 14 on...(Thankfully, you can scroll through to the juicy stuff.) More to come on DOJ, FTC, CFTC and FERC...

June 2011  by Rogue Philosopher The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World’s Oil Market by Leah McGrath Goodman details how a handful of commodity traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) manipulated the energy futures markets and thereby did more...

The price of oil is set not in Vienna at the headquarters of OPEC, but at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Llewellyn King, PBS Sunday, May 1, 2011 WASHINGTON -- The fate of the Obama presidency hangs not on a birth certificate or the red ink on the federal budget but...