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The 20th century could be categorized as THE century when communications took off and we started living in each other’s pockets. Lives had been ruined by war, trouble and strife. Wealth had been redistributed beyond belief. There were no longer just a few that were making the profits, but there were growing classes of people that wanted recognition.

They might not have got it until the second half of the 20th century, but the way things unraveled in the first half meant that people were not prepared to sit back and let things go into the hands of the rich landlords and the factory owners.

Rights had been acquired and they were being demanded. Women, workers, whoever...

Europe has been postponing the recapitalisation of its banking sector. This column argues that it has been doing so for far too long. Without such a recapitalisation, the danger is that economic stagnation will continue for a long period, thereby putting Europe on a course towards Japanese-style inertia and the proliferation of zombie banks.

Unlike the US, Europe failed to recapitalise its biggest banks following the financial crisis of 2007-09. Instead, policymakers gambled that economic recovery would lift the profitability of financial institutions, enabling them to increase their capital buffers over time. It is now clear that this strategy has failed. The Eurozone is in a new recession...

Those in Washington and elsewhere have little interest in drawing attention to the municipal disaster that is the City of Detroit, Michigan.

While nobody likes dealing with disasters, there is no other single appropriate word to describe this once proud burgeoning metropolis. As recently reported by The Wall Street Journal,

The city of Detroit’s manifold problems are coming to a head. Emergency manager Kevyn Orr warned the city’s 150 or so creditors and unions on Friday that Chapter 9 bankruptcy is in the offing if they don’t accept the steep cuts he’s presented.

I will allow others to opine on the multitude of reasons that has brought Detroit to...

A summer storm may be brewing for stocks, warns Huffington Post’s Natalie Pace, and gold may yet again shine for investors.

Pace points out a trifecta of bad news on the horizon for the stock market:

The federal debt ceiling was breached on May 19 — to almost zero notice in the media. The Treasury suspended investments in federal worker retirement funds in order to remain solvent. This has bought the government until around Labor Day to come up with a deal to raise the ceiling… which will almost certainly come to another last-minute budget battle. Stocks will buck at the debt battle like they did the last several times this happened...

Over the past several years, I have been discussing the tech sector with my brother Michael Whalen who is currently the Head of Digital Rights Administration for TuneSat,LLC. TuneSat’s audio fingerprint technology monitors hundreds of TV channels in 14 countries and crawls millions of websites. Michael is a professor at NYU and The City College of NY, a two-time Emmy® Award-Winning composer as well as an internationally-known recording artist. Last month on Zero Hedge, we spoke about the outlook for Apple Inc (AAPL). This month we return to one of our favorite topics, namely Facebook (FB). By way of background, you can read the February 2012 discussion with Michael...

Passenger car sale demand for May dropped by 5.9 percent on the same month last year in the 27-country European Union to 1.042 million units, the lowest level since May 1993, when sales dropped below 1 million, according to new figures released by ACEA. For the first five months of the year, sales dropped 6.8 percent to 5.07 million.

The economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro shrank by 0.2 percent in the first quarter of this year — the sixth such decline in a row — and unemployment is at 12.2 percent. Meanwhile, the wider 27-country EU has also seen its economy slide into recession, shrinking 0.1 percent in the first three months of 2013.

Europe's recession has hit carmakers especially hard, as consumers put off purchases...

We often hear about how the government needs to run its budget just like a household does. It’s an easy analogy to understand, but it’s also completely wrong. But first let’s review some of the MR basics.

First, most of the money in our monetary system is called “inside money” because it is created inside the private sector in the process of loan creation. Loans create deposits and we use those deposits as the primary way to transact in the US economy. Outside money comes from the government because it originates outside the private sector. This includes cash, coins and bank reserves. This form of money facilitates inside money. For instance, bank reserves exist primarily to help private banks settle payments among one another. And cash exists to allow bank account owners (inside money account owners) to transact more conveniently by drawing down their accounts. See here for more...

So I do some conferences with a lot of people who are way smarter than me, people literally and figuratively on the cutting edge.

What thoughts are dominating health care these days, especially the provider community?

Here is a list of frequent talking points, further in-depth discussion of some of them later.

The provider community is in chaos, seeking “what is the best strategic move to insure survival?”

The focus of Obamacare isn’t clear, is it?

The court’s decision in Halbig v. Sebelius will determine the extent of the federal government’s authority to establish exchanges on behalf of states that have effectively opted out of Obamacare.

ALEXANDRIA — All of the Affordable Care Act could hang on the outcome of an upcoming court case.

The court’s decision in Halbig v. Sebelius will determine the extent of the federal government’s authority to establish exchanges on behalf of states that have effectively opted out of Obamacare.

If the court sides with the plaintiff, four individual taxpayers and three employers, the 33 states that have not yet set up an exchange system — including Virginia — will have...