By Kevin Libin National Post February 7, 2009.
By the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed his nation in his first radio fireside chat one March evening in 1933, America’s banking system was on the brink of collapse. A fifth of the country’s financial institutions were out of business. Citizens, nervous about losing their savings, had started a run on the remaining banks’ cash, preferring the safety of mattresses. Roosevelt, having ordered the banks closed, spoke to a rattled and frightened nation. There was, to be blunt, not much stirring in his words. Continue Reading »
By Peter Foster
National Post, January 29, 2009. 7:03 PM
The typically pretentious theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos is “Shaping the Post-Crisis World.” But didn’t Davos shape the pre-crisis world, and thus the crisis itself? The annual Alpine gabfest has long been the epicentre of ‘globaloney,’ a mixture of serious discussion, subversive ideas and outright flakery. It has certainly never — as some critics believe — been about promoting capitalism. Rather it has always been a mercantilist stew in which big businessmen, big government and big international bureaucracy get together to suck both the collective thumb and the collective teat. Its ideological heart is the impossible UN dream of “global governance,” and of a corporate sector moving “beyond” mere profits to take on the heavy mantles of social responsibility, sustainable development, Global Compacts and Millennium Development Goals. Continue Reading »
Just saw a fascinating documentary on Nova (Tuesday evening is the best night for TV – Nova and then, typically, Front Line). Here is what I learned:
Global Dimming of the Sun is created by particulate matter in the atmosphere creating conditions that reflect sun energy back into space resulting in a cooling effect on the planet. Although it seems that the developed nations are creating more of the CO2 (the Global Warming agent), we have been steadily reducing our particulate discharge over the last 50 years. It is the developing countries (seen the video-feeds from the Beijing Olympics?) that are spewing the particles. Continue Reading »
Jan 24, 2009 04:30 AM
David Olive
Toronto Star Business Columnist
As with all fads, we should be wary of the deficit chic that has turned the heads of even the most resolute deficit hawks. It will prompt the federal finance minister, Jim Flaherty, in his “stimulus” budget Tuesday to put Canada on the road to a $64 billion deficit over the next two years – surpassing the record $43 billion deficit of the early 1990s that Canadians sacrificed for years to eradicate.
And it’s unlikely to accomplish much. The main reason for this, I suspect, is that Canada is not in an economic crisis at all. Continue Reading »
