Fed's Minutes May Leave Investors Hungering for More

A study has found that the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes haven’t necessarily been the best predictor of changes in interest rates.

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Ken Thompson: Prosecutor and criminal justice reformer

"I WANT to apologise to you for what happened to you. I'm sorry," said Ken Thompson, Brooklyn’s district attorney. He was speaking to Paul Gatling, an 81-year old man who 50 years earlier had been convicted of a murder he did not commit. He had an alibi. But the investigation was flawed and Mr Gatling was not given a fair trial. He was put under pressure to take a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, which he did, and he was sentenced to 30 years to life. But he continued to profess his innocence. In 1973, Mr Gatling’s sentence was commuted by the governor of New York, but he was still classed a felon. In May this year, thanks to Mr Thompson's efforts, Mr Gatling was given a clean record.  He is one of more than 20 people wrongfully convicted whose names have been cleared by Mr Thompson since 2014, when he became Brooklyn’s first black district attorney.

Mr Thompson’s death on October 9th after a brief battle with cancer has shocked and saddened those who work in criminal justice—and many others besides. Mr Thompson, a Democrat, held the position for less than three years, but his influence stretched beyond Brooklyn’s borders in that time. After he took office...Continue reading

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Smart or Lucky, Google Can Feast on Samsung's Misfortune

Google’s new Pixel phones can benefit from demise of Galaxy Note 7 and take on Apple in high-end market.

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Malawi’s president disappears

AFRICA’S leaders are not known for their youthful vigour. So it is not surprising that their absence from the public eye, especially in a Western country with an abundant supply of good hospitals, tends to spark lurid rumours of illness and even death. Malawi’s president has certainly been doing his best impression of a missing person: having landed in New York on September 16th, Peter Mutharika has not been heard from since the UN General Assembly, which ended on 26th September.

Malawians have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #BringBackMutharika (a play on #BringBackOurGirls, which was used to rally support for Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram). One tweeted the presidents of America and Rwanda to ask if they had any news of the missing head of state. Speculation swirled that Mr Mutharika, who is in his mid-70s and whose brother died of a heart attack while president in 2012, was undergoing some kind of medical treatment.

Eventually the Malawian government put out an ill-tempered press release on October 9th, harrumphing that Mr Mutharika was in “very good and robust health” and still carrying out his duties while in...Continue reading

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Flash Crash Bang Wallop

Comfort and Challenge for Investors in the Default Data

The global high-yield default rate is forecast to fall. Markets are already ahead of the game.

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Brexit is making Britons poorer, and meaner

THESE are exciting times for Britain’s currency, and not in a good way. On the eve of the vote on whether to leave the European Union, back in June, a pound bought you $1.48. Sterling has since declined by more than 16% against the dollar, to $1.22. Nearly half of the drop has occurred in the last week or so, as the Conservative government has outlined plans for a “hard” Brexit: one which shoves Britain right out of the single market in exchange for the ability to do more harm to itself by reducing migration.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Greg Ip (a friend and former colleague of this blogger) does a nice job explaining the links between Brexit and a tumbling pound. Markets anticipate that it will become more costly for British firms to sell goods and services to Europe. Europeans will consequently buy fewer of them, and therefore fewer pounds, leading to a weaker currency. That is, cheap sterling is part of the adjustment to a loss in British competitiveness: the mechanism by which Britons come to spend less on foreign goodies (now...Continue reading

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America's Fling With Bling Is Getting Old

A post-election rebound in U.S. luxury spending could prove wishful thinking.

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Why Samsung's Dud Phones Will Cause Lasting Damage

Samsung’s latest recall will test the patience of its smartphone-addicted customers.

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China Debt Problems Get Watered-Down Medicine

China’s debt-for-equity swap program will do little to solve the problem of the hard cases where most of the debt is concentrated.

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Investors See New Risk in Trump Swoon: A Democratic Congress

As the chances of Donald Trump taking the White House decline, investors must weight the possibility of the Democrats taking the House.

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Alcoa's Split Won't Wrap Up Problems

Alcoa’s third-quarter earnings report Tuesday will be its last as a single company.

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An Extended Trial for Bristol-MyersSquibb

Bristol-Myers Squibb’s disappointing clinical trial results may continue to weigh on the stock.

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The rise of Syria’s White Helmets

AMMAR AL-SELMO no longer bothers to identify the dead bodies he pulls from the rubble of Aleppo City. There are simply too many. The dead are given numbers rather than names, and buried in trenches in the city’s parks; often 10 to a grave.

Sometimes, as he searches for survivors amid the twisted metal and concrete slabs of buildings destroyed by air strikes, Mr Selmo finds the severed hand of a child. At night, he wonders who the hands belonged to; which family lost their son or daughter that day.

“The worst part of my job is watching people die in the ambulances,” the 32-year-old says. “They just hold me. They clutch onto me. It is their last breath and they grab me by the hair or by the shirt as if doing this will save them from death.”

A teacher before the war, Mr Selmo is now the head of Syria’s civil-defence unit in the rebel-held half of Aleppo. His team of volunteers is the first to respond when bombs flatten buildings, rushing into the thick clouds of fine white dust to dig through the rubble for survivors.

Operating across rebel-held parts of the country, Syria’s civil-defence team has grown from small,...Continue reading

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The World Looks Brighter for U.S. Companies

The global economy looks as if it is in for another year of weak growth, but the sales that U.S. companies draw from abroad could get a lot better.

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Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom win the Nobel prize for economic sciences

SUPPOSE that you and I are interested in opening a lemonade stand together. We agree that I will bring the materials we need (cups, stand and so forth) while you will make the lemonade. I’ll do the pouring while you mind the cashbox and at the end we will split the proceeds fairly. A doubt niggles, though. I am worried you might, at the end, try to hog the contents of the cashbox. We therefore decide to draw up a contract (common practice in the lemonade-stand industry) dictating that the returns to our operation must be split evenly. But then you start to worry: much of the success of our stand will depend on the quality of the lemonade, over which I have no control. What if I decide to slack off and piggyback on your lemonade-brewing genius, knowing that after you pour your sweat into the lemonade (not literally), the split is still an even 50-50? We therefore set to haggling over language in the contract setting out precisely how each of us should do our respective jobs.

Contracts play a critical role in the operation of the modern economy. They set out who is allowed to do what with the land they own, the people they employ and the songs they store on their smartphone....Continue reading

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Presidential Election Is Already Taking a Toll on Earnings Season

Political jitters prompted a record-low number of companies to issue earnings guidance in September.

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Bond Markets: The Uneven Playing Field Facing Investors

Bond returns have faded from their peaks. Government borrowers have the upper hand.

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How Banks Will Struggle With Finance's Long, Slow Decline

Fines and capital-rule changes should soon be wrapped up, but that is just half the battle.

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Donald Trump threatens to lock up Hillary Clinton

SO THIS is how it was to end: a septuagenarian con-man flanked by four victims of sexual assault, real or alleged, trying to intimidate his opponent by dredging up old accusations against her husband, Bill Clinton. That pre-debate Facebook Live broadcast by Donald Trump, which combined farce, dystopia and reality-TV in three tawdry minutes, presaged the tone of the encounter that followed. As it turned out, his second confrontation with Hillary Clinton, at a town-hall style event in St Louis, did not signal the end of Mr Trump’s presidential bid. It may not lead to the headlong disintegration of the Republican Party, another outcome predicted in advance. Instead a hairline crack may have opened in the American republic itself.

In the light of events of the past few days, Mr Trump’s misjudgment in tweeting about a beauty queen’s non-existent sex tape already seems quaint. (“I’m not unproud of it”, he said of his social-media habit, suggesting that his small-hours calumnies were evidence of his fitness to cope with crises.) In his first opportunity to address the bigger scandal that has upended his campaign, through an opening question about whether the candidates set...Continue reading

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Where Virtual Meets Reality

Virtual reality got a slow start with Oculus. PlayStationVR should broaden the small market.

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Donald Trump boasts of groping women

IS THIS the end for Donald Trump’s presidential ambition? It just might be.

A fortnight ago, as he prepared for the first presidential debate, the Republican nominee was almost level with Hillary Clinton in the polls. But after an offensive and intemperate performance on September 29th, followed by more blunders—including a ridiculous series of late-night tweets intended to slander a former beauty queen, who had decried his obnoxious treatment of her—the Republican nominee is trailing by five points.

And now this:   

On October 7th the Washington Post posted a video on its website that included recorded remarks by Mr Trump which were repellent even by his low standards. They formed part of a conversation with Billy Bush, a television presenter, which was recorded in 2005, as Mr Trump was getting ready for a television appearance to publicise his cameo role in a soap opera. Mr Bush, who happens to be a nephew of George H.W. Bush, was accompanying Mr Trump on-set, initially aboard a bus, and seemingly wired up to a microphone.

The recorded conversation, which was leaked to the Post from NBC, starts with him describing his...Continue reading

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A short-handed Supreme Court begins a new term

THE JUSTICES returned to their chairs this week facing a docket that looks modest by the standards of recent years. With one seat of the nine vacant since February, when Antonin Scalia died, the risk of 4-4 ties in tricky cases seems to be making the justices choosier. Only 40 cases are on the list so far, and there are no real blockbusters among them. But despite the dearth of doozies—the past two terms have seen cases involving same-sex marriage, Obamacare, abortion and affirmative action—the docket does feature significant disputes, including a large handful involving race.

On October 5th, the court heard the case of Duane Buck, a black man awaiting execution in Texas. Mr Buck was sent to death row after his lawyers put a psychologist on the stand to testify that Mr Buck’s race made him more likely to commit violent crimes in the future. To compound the injury, the lawyer handling Mr Buck’s appeal tarried in filing a claim of inept representation. In Buck v Davis, the justices will resolve whether what amounts to a missed deadline should allow a blatant episode of injustice to pass quietly into the night.

A more difficult race-infused criminal justice...Continue reading

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CIT Faces Headwinds Even Without Air Unit

After selling its air-leasing unit, CIT Group will still struggle with underwhelming returns.

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The Job Market: Any Which Way But Tight

The way the job market continues to draw in new workers suggests the Federal Reserve has little to worry about on the inflation front.

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Stacking More Chips on KLA-Tencor

Despite losing its merger partner Lam Research, KLA-Tencor’s prospects look good.

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The Colombian president’s premature peace prize

THE Norwegian Nobel Committee has a penchant for awarding premature peace prizes. It gave one to Barack Obama less than a year into his presidency. And now it has bestowed one on Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, just days after Colombian voters rejected in a plebiscite his plan to end the country’s 52-year-long war with the FARC, a hybrid revolutionary army and organised-crime outfit.

The committee’s head, Kaci Kullman Five, acknowledged the “real danger” that the war will resume after voters vetoed the peace accord on October 2nd. She thinks that the prize will make that less likely. “We hope it will encourage all good initiatives and all the parties who could make a difference in this process in Colombia,” she said. Whether it will is the question of the hour in Colombia. The majority against the accord was a narrow one—50.2% to 49.8%—and turnout was low. Both Mr Santos and the FARC promised to continue working towards peace. In accepting the prize, Mr Santos called on Colombians to “unite our efforts, our minds and our hearts so that we all win the most important prize: peace for Colombia.”

In the...Continue reading

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Brexit Turns Ugly for Pound, Gilts

The pound is tumbling and U.K. government bond yields are rising. Political risk is arriving in style.

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Chinese Consumers Could Feel Pinch of Debt

Judging by how much debt Chinese consumers are accumulating, they may be less resilient than they appear.

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Sterling takes a pounding

THE FOREIGN exchange markets are about the most liquid trading arena in the world, certainly for the major currencies. So sterling's 6% fall in two minutes this morning - from $1.26 to $1.18, with a similar-sized move against the euro, was a very unusual event. 

Traders' minds went back to the Swiss franc's sudden jump in early 2015, when the currency rose by 30% in an instant. But that was down to a change in policy; the abandonment of the Swiss National Bank's cap on the franc's strength. There was no such news to affect the pound.

The best explanation seems to lie in the world of algorithmic trading - the computer programmes that automatically generate transactions. Such programmes have been blamed for "flash crashes" in the equity markets, particularly the May 2010 event which saw the Dow plunge nearly 1000 points in minutes before recovering. The problem seems to be that programmes feed off each other. Each may have a trigger point which requires the programme to sell an asset (currency, bond or share) when it falls below...Continue reading

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Jack Welch's Debunked Jobs Conspiracy,Four Years Later

No, the books aren’t cooked. But is the labor market as strong as the numbers suggest? The answer isn’t so clear-cut.

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Gloom Could Lift for MetLife After Brighthouse Split

The planned separation of MetLife’s consumer unit, to be called Brighthouse, will leave the core company in a better financial position.

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Wal-Mart: What Will It Cost to Compete With Amazon?

Investors will want proof that Wal-Mart’s spending on its new e-commerce strategy is having the needed effect.

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The Supreme Court is likely to nix a racist death sentence

LAST spring, Scott Keller, the solicitor general for Texas, rose to defend his state’s indefensible abortion clinic regulations at the Supreme Court. The hearing did not go well for Mr Keller—the justices struck down Texas’s rules as an unconstitutional burden on the right to abortion choice. On October 5th, Mr Keller again took the podium with an unenviable task: arguing that a black man had no claim to a new sentencing trial even though the jury that sent him to death row had heard testimony—from a defence witness, no less—that black men are particularly prone to violence.

No one disputes that Duane Buck’s crimes were violent, or vile. Mr Keller’s opening words to the justices drew immediate attention to the details of his misdeeds in 1995: “We're here today defending the death sentence because [Mr Buck] murdered a mother in front of her children”, he said. “He put a gun to the chest of his stepsister and shot her, and he murdered another man”. But the question in Buck v Davis is not how heinous these murders were. The issue is whether the decision of Mr Buck’s stunningly inept court-appointed lawyer to put a psychologist on the stand who...Continue reading

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The battle for a party’s soul

He said no, the party said go

IF ANY political party can claim to have invented modern Spain, it is the Socialists. They have ruled for 21 of the 39 years of Spain’s restored democracy. Under Felipe González, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), to give it its full name, took the country into the EU and NATO and modernised its economy. And under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero it modernised cultural attitudes, loosening restrictions on abortion and approving gay rights.

Now the PSOE threatens to tear itself apart. Amid extraordinary scenes at its headquarters in the placid Madrid barrio of Argüelles, the party’s general secretary, Pedro Sánchez (pictured), clung to his post for three days after more than half his executive resigned. Following a 12-hour meeting of the party’s nearly 300-strong federal committee on October 1st, which featured shouts, tears and what looked like an attempt to rig a secret ballot, Mr Sánchez resigned, defeated by 132 votes to 107. He has been replaced by a caretaker committee.

One cause of this internal warfare was the party’s string of...Continue reading

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Politisch inkorrekt

DIETER STEIN, the editor of Junge Freiheit (“Young Freedom”), a newspaper, represents the German right wing’s thoughtful side, rather than its demagogues. In his office, a poster of Frederick the Great, a Prussian monarch beloved by conservatives, hangs on one wall. Another has a picture of Dresden’s Church of Our Lady—destroyed by the Allied firebombing of 1945, fully rebuilt only in 2005, and today iconic for German nationalists. Above his desk hangs a portrait of Count Claus von Stauffenberg, an army officer executed after trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Mr Stein considers him a conservative patriot, part of a “positive tradition” that Germans can be proud of. He thereby draws a hard line between his newspaper and the neo-Nazi right.

Yet for most of the three decades since Mr Stein founded Junge Freiheit—first as a student newspaper and, since 1994, as a general weekly—the label “right” condemned him to the margins of Germany’s media landscape. In German usage, the term does not include the centre-right. For instance Bild, the largest...Continue reading

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Un prophète

A great big reform package

AT SIX o’clock on a Sunday evening, Ettore Rosato is addressing an audience of fewer than 100 people in Seregno, a picturesque commuter town north of Milan. His brief: to persuade them to back the government’s constitutional reform in a referendum eight weeks hence. Earlier that day Mr Rosato, who leads the governing Democratic Party (PD) in the Chamber of Deputies, was in Switzerland canvassing expatriate voters; the day before, in Sardinia. He will not stop zigzagging through Italy until the vote is held on December 4th.

That his party should deploy a politician of Mr Rosato’s stature to a place like Seregno (population: 45,000) attests to the fear that has seized the PD as poll after poll finds majorities ready to reject the reform. Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, has said he will resign if he loses. That has turned the referendum into a personal vote of confidence, at a time when his popularity is waning and the economy slowing.

The gamble is understandable. Mr Renzi and his advisers are convinced Italy’s woes are institutional, that under the current system structural reforms will be thwarted by vested interests, and that only a...Continue reading

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The wizard of Budapest

“THE moment Hungary is no longer European,” wrote Milan Kundera, a Czech-born novelist, “it loses the essence of its identity.” In his own way Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, would not disagree. Having bent the Hungarian state to his will, crushed his domestic foes and spun political gold from Europe’s migrant crisis, Mr Orban now has his sights trained on the immigration-friendly elites he claims seek to destroy Europe’s nations from within. Together with Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the de facto leader of Poland, he promises a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe, based on a defence of nation, family and Christianity.

Charismatic, bombastic and unembarrassable, Mr Orban squats toad-like astride the Hungarian political landscape. His Fidesz party dominates parliament. Setbacks are skated over. On October 2nd only 40% of Hungary’s electorate cast valid votes in a referendum on the European Union’s refugee-relocation plan, well below the 50% threshold needed to give the result force. No matter: Mr Orban saluted the “excellent result” (98% of voters rejected the EU scheme) and promised to insert it into Hungary’s constitution....Continue reading

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Going nuclear

THE list reads like a hostage-taker’s demands. Russia wants America to roll back the expansion of NATO, repeal the Magnitsky Act, end sanctions and pay compensation for Russia’s losses. Until it does, Vladimir Putin declared this week, Russia will stop abiding by an agreement regulating the disposal of plutonium. Russia was forced to act, Mr Putin claimed, because of “the threat to strategic stability posed by America’s hostile actions” (and its failure to deliver on its end of the deal). The move is a reminder that, unlike America, Russia is happy to throw nuclear arguments into the mix when it does not get its way.

The suspension of the Plutonium Management and Disposal Agreement (PMDA) is a message intended not so much for Barack Obama as for his successor. “Russia does not plan to work seriously with America” until a new administration arrives in 2017, says Andrey Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council. Mr Putin’s demands serve as a “wish list” should the next American president seek to restore the relationship.

Tensions between Russia and America have been building over Syria, where...Continue reading

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ECB vs Bond Markets: Jitters Likely to Persist

For once, Mario Draghi may have been less reassuring for markets than he could have been.

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Fifty Shades, Sahel-style

A FEW minutes into Kantin Kwari market, sandwiched between the stalls selling grain and those hawking second-hand shirts, is a little alleyway where girls flock for advice. It is in short supply in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north, where women are poorly schooled and married off at their fathers’ behest, often as children. Those with wedding woes or family dramas could do worse than consult the littattafan soyayya, or “love literature”, flogged by booksellers there.

Written in Hausa, these romantic novels are the work of mostly female authors, who have been printing their own works in Kano since Nigeria’s publishing industry fell apart in the 1980s. They are not exactly “Fifty Shades of Grey”, the West’s self-published sex sensation of recent times: many are classic Cinderella stories or pious parables about housewifery. But there are also blistering tales of child marriage, polygamy and philandering; subversive stuff for a conservative region.

This is sadly familiar to many of the authors. Balaraba Yakubu, a pioneer of the industry, recounts how she was removed from school to be married at 13. Another...Continue reading

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Trouble in paradise

Not as nice as it looks

THE young woman’s voice is flat, as she describes a group of masked men breaking down the door while she slept in March this year. She says she was then forced into a car, beaten and gang-raped. Afterwards a passer-by found her abandoned on the roadside, unable to walk unsupported. “It was so painful,” she says, staring into the middle distance. “When I remember it, it’s a trial.” The woman is one of dozens of people on the archipelago of Zanzibar who claim to have been attacked by plain-clothes militiamen, known as “zombies”, since March 2015. Their crime: supporting the main opposition party.

In the West, Zanzibar conjures up images of sugary white sands, warm breezes and turquoise waters. But Tanzania’s islands have a darker side. From the 18th century an Arab elite grew rich there trading ivory, spices and slaves. The mainly Muslim archipelago gained independence from Britain in December 1963, though only very briefly: the sultan was overthrown a month later and the island was merged with Tanganyika on the mainland in April 1964.

The country has been ruled since 1977 by the Chama cha Mapinduzi...Continue reading

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The day after

Samarra’s dome rebuilt

A PROMINENT Sunni preacher is describing how the demise of Islamic State could herald a new era of Sunni-Shia reconciliation, when a Shia soldier at the checkpoint outside his home town of Samara interrupts his musings. “Your people blew up our shrines,” he says, ordering the sheikh, Salah al-Taha, out of the car. Left to wait in the sun for a couple of hours while a commanding officer is roused from his rest, the sheikh’s resentment returns. Samarra, 125km (80 miles) north of Baghdad, is no longer his own, he says. Shia militias have taken over the old city, and chased out its Sunni inhabitants.

In place of Samarra’s past easy symbiosis—where Sunnis thrived from running hotels and restaurants for Shia pilgrims—the city is now divided in two. A seething outer new town of displaced Sunnis surrounds an inner pockmarked ghost-town manned by a conglomerate of Shia militias. Its centrepiece is the gold-plated dome over the shrine of the 10th and 11th Shia imams (rulers), which jihadists blew up in 2006. The shrine has been restored with even more glitter. The rare Sunni crossing its threshold...Continue reading

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The battle for Mosul

AS IRAQ’S army, backed by America and its allies, mobilises at Mosul’s gates, Islamic State’s rigid hold over Iraq’s second city shows signs of slipping. In August an Iraqi ground offensive pushed IS from the Qayyara area, some 65km (40 miles) south of Mosul, and its adjacent oil wells, costing the self-styled caliphate much of its revenue, and allowing a big forward base to be built. Jihadists’ salaries, once higher than those of Iraqi soldiers, have plummeted. Its hope of retaining an industrial base is but a dream. When it left Qayyara IS set the oil wells aflame. An orderly tax regime is degenerating into extortion of the 1.5m people left under its rule. For the right price, anyone can leave the city. Even the “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is said to have fled to take refuge in a village.

His military capabilities seem as shrunken as his financial ones. Mr Baghdadi has emulated the Prophet Muhammad’s defences of Medina from pagans, digging a trench around Mosul. But so severe has been the American-led bombardment by jets and drones that IS is now said to be deploying children instead of foreigners as suicide-bombers. All but two of...Continue reading

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Carolina crossfire

Purple haze

“I LOOOOOVE Michelle,” proclaimed an African-American woman at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Charlotte on October 4th—stipulating those extra vowels as testament to her passion for the current first lady, the event’s star turn. The terms the attendees used to describe their feelings for the Democratic candidate herself were cooler: “like” and “support” cropped up more often than “love”. One man frankly admitted to voting for Mrs Clinton out of duty rather than devotion. Her biggest asset in crowds such as this, besides the backing of Michelle Obama and her husband, is fear of Donald Trump. “Let’s turn this mother out,” urged Alma Adams, a congresswoman, to a whoop.

Roughly a quarter of North Carolina’s electorate is black. In 2012 they voted at a higher rate than whites—a showing that could not prevent Mitt Romney narrowly winning back the state for the Republicans, after Barack Obama scraped it, even more narrowly, in 2008 (by a handful of votes per precinct, as Mrs Obama reminded her acolytes in Charlotte). This time, unless Mr Trump can emulate Mr Romney’s performance here, he will...Continue reading

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More present than correct

Many happy repayments

TO BELIEVE some young voters—especially those who showed up at Bernie Sanders rallies earlier this year—America is in the midst of a student debt crisis. In 2010 student loans overtook credit cards to become the biggest source of American household debt other than mortgages. Today, they total about 7% of GDP. Of those who have borrowed from the federal government and began repayments in 2011, 10% defaulted within two years, up from 4.5% in 2003. The problem animates the left: whereas Donald Trump has talked about the subject only fleetingly, Hillary Clinton has detailed policies for helping penniless scholars. Who could oppose such a worthy aim?

Defaults on student debt are highest among so-called “non-traditional” students. They attend community colleges, which provide short, typically two-year courses, or profitmaking universities, which offer heavily marketed and pricey degrees which are sometimes of dubious merit. According to number-crunching by Adam Looney of the Treasury Department and Constantine Yannelis of New York University, non-traditional students made up more than half of all new...Continue reading

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Mr Johnson and Dr Stein

GARY JOHNSON, the presidential nominee of the Libertarians, and Jill Stein, his counterpart for the Greens, are idealists. Both believe they are fighting for a better politics, a kinder America and, in Dr Stein’s case, though not the globally incurious Mr Johnson’s, a safer world. So there is one question that really gets their goat: how do you feel about helping Donald Trump become president?

“I’m the spoiler? I’m the wasted vote? It just pisses me off,” harrumphs Mr Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, known for his love of pot and extreme sports. “It’s not my job to tell people who is the second best,” grumbles Dr Stein, a Harvard-educated physician and former Democrat. “It is a unique election not only because Donald Trump is scary.”

If the main purpose of a presidential election is to push unorthodox ideas and build space for new movements, their irritation is fully justified. If it is to elect a president, Mr Johnson and Dr Stein are on softer ground. For the 10% of the vote they are polling, including 7.5% for Mr Johnson, is hurting Hillary Clinton as much as it is hurting the unidealistic Mr Trump....Continue reading

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Heard on the trail

Insomnia
“Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?”
Donald Trump’s early morning tweet

Minority outreach continues
“I think it’s so important Donald Trump went to that black church and spoke to the black people directly. And if they can be educated they certainly will come over to the side of Donald Trump and the Republicans.”
Actor Jon Voight has been campaigning for Mr Trump. Sean Hannity Show

The flopsy bunnies
“Republicans are a bunch of frightened rabbits. Unfortunately, we have a party made up of a bunch of people who get frightened very easily, and their hands start to shake whenever something happens that they don’t like.”
Trump fan Rudy Giuliani berates his fellow Republicans. Washington Post 

Surgical attack
“It would have been a joke if it had been said, but I don’t recall that.”
Hillary...Continue reading

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Mainstream opposites

KEEP Donald Trump off the stage and wash this presidential campaign’s mouth out with soap, and American politics is still broken. That is the result that emerged from a controlled experiment in political science conducted on October 4th—more formally known as the only vice-presidential debate of 2016.

The debate pitted Hillary Clinton’s running-mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, against Mr Trump’s sidekick, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. The two men, both sons of the Midwest with a neat line in folksy, aw-shucks modesty, spent quite a lot of their 90-minute clash stressing how much they respected each other’s faith and essential decency, even as they sparred about tax rates, how to fight terrorism and other questions of policy. As the pair bragged, competitively, about their middle-American credentials, Mr Pence took an early start by announcing: “I grew up with a cornfield in my backyard.” Mr Kaine countered that he had worked with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras as a young man. Neither man swanked about the size of his genitals, called anyone fat or declared himself a genius. With Mr Trump and his almost-as-disliked rival Hillary Clinton...Continue reading

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