As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary.

China’s successful transformation from a middle-income country to a modern, high-income country will depend largely on the reforms that the government undertakes over the next decade. Financial reforms should top the agenda, beginning with interest-rate liberalization.

The doctrine of imposing present pain for future benefit has a long history – stretching all the way back to Adam Smith and his praise of “parsimony.” It is particularly vociferous in “hard times.” In 1930, US President Herbert Hoover was advised by his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.

Kyle Bass hopes he is wrong, and so may everyone else, as the danger predicted by the founder of Dallas-based Hayman Capital is nothing less than a full blown financial crisis in the world’s third-largest economy, Japan.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who respect coercive authority and consider it legitimate, and those who do not. The former group is likewise split into two factions: a relatively small group that, for whatever reason, essentially worships power, and a much larger one whose members merely tolerate authoritarianism, either as a matter of expedience or habit.

“For three years and more Beltway politics has been all about the deficit. Urgent action was needed to avert crisis. A Grand Bargain absolutely had to be reached. Fix the Debt, now now now!

One of the primary focuses of \"Out of the Box\" is on where you might get hurt and, more importantly, seriously hurt. \"Preservation of Capital,\" the first ten rules of my thinking, has reached epic seriousness in a world with interest rates at unsustainable lows and underlying economic fundamentals that cannot support today's yields.

Several of my Harvard University colleagues have recently been casualties in the crossfire between fiscal “austerians” and fiscal stimulators. The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have received an astounding amount of press attention since it was discovered that they made a spreadsheet error in a 2010 paper that examined the statistical relationship between debt and growth. They quickly conceded their error

Some two years into Egypt’s grass-roots revolution, the country’s economy is in a worrisome downward spiral. A growing number of people, inside and outside of the country, are starting to blame the revolution itself for derailing an economy that was growing, reducing its external-debt burden, and maintaining a comfortable cushion of international reserves.

Senior government official confirmed the development, explaining that the decision not to consult with RBI was taken to avoid what he described as a \"conflict of interest\".

IN THE past 35 years, hundreds of millions of Chinese have found productive, if often exhausting, work in the country’s growing cities. This extraordinary mobilisation of labour is the biggest economic event of the past half-century. The world has seen nothing on such scale before. Will it see anything like it again? The answer lies across the Himalayas in India.

The mystique of the Bermuda Triangle has caught the imagination and interest of generations. In much the same way it has also caught my attention and I feel that now there is a Bermuda Triangle of economics - a space where everything tends to disappear without radar contact, a black hole in which rationality and science is replaced by hope, superstition and nonsense pundits like myself pretending to understand the real drivers of the economy.

The evils of this deluge of paper money are not to be removed until our citizens are generally and radically instructed in their cause and consequences, and silence by their authority the interested clamors and sophistry of speculating, shaving, and banking institutions.

[Tepper] said the post showed “when the equity risk premium is high historically, you get better returns after that.” He continued, “So we’re at one of the highest all-time risk premiums in history.”

Today, Benjamin Graham is known primarily as Warren Buffett’s investing mentor and the author of multiple classics about value investing. Toward the end of his life, in the 1973 edition of “The Intelligent Investor,” Graham wrote, “Ever since 1934 we have argued in our writings for a more intelligent and energetic attitude by stockholders toward their managements”.

The newspapers and TV channels reported the Dow 15,000 story last week as though it were just a stepping stone on the way to 16,000… or 20,000… or 30,000.Heck, the sky’s the limit!

The brouhaha over Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s article “Growth in a Time of Debt” may be the most conspicuous and incendiary scholarly controversy since 1974, when two earlier economists, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published a notorious book, Time on the Cross, defending the efficiency of American plantation slavery.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker warned of the risks of an asset bubble forming given the incredible amount of liquidity the Bernanke Fed has injected into the market, even though he said banks are substantially stronger than before the crisis on Wednesday. Volcker also indicated that in the U.S. government makes up about 35% of GDP and that the financing of the residential mortgage market by the state has led to a dysfunctional financial system.

The Bank of England has upgraded its economic growth forecast. BBC reports. The perennially gloomy Sir Mervyn King says the Bank now expects GDP growth of 0.5% during the current quarter. This flies in the face of the current vogue for seeing the UK economy as a basket case, limping from one lacklustre economic quarter to the next as Cherry Reynard reports

Today, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population lives in conflict-affected and fragile states. Despite vast sums of money spent aiding such states over the last 50 years, armed conflict and violence continue to blight the lives of millions of people around the world. International and national partners must radically change the way they engage such states.