Public Broadband Infrastructure

There's a piece at CiF which I think rather fails in its major premise.
At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone's lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs...

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Daily Brief

When securities regulators head to the Hill later today for a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, the questions about who knew what about Bernie Madoff's operations when will surely be fired off with a dash of vitriol.

But one regulator won't be forced to answer those questions just yet: Mary Schapiro, Barack Obama's pick for new S.E.C. chairman. Rest assured, her time will come.

Schapiro runs Finra, the brokerage industry's self-regulatory organization. Since Bernard L. Madoff Securities was a registered broker-dealer, Finra was at least partially responsible for policing its operations.

According to a story in...

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Broken glass

Is Waterford Wedgwood luxury, or "masstige"? Either way, it's bust. Its $625 million in debt is essentially worthless, it's been losing money before interest payments for a couple of years now, and its prospects, as we enter another grim year for the retail market, have never been poorer.

My guess is that someone, somewhere, will pick up the iconic brands -- Waterford, Wedgwood, Rosenthal, Royal Doulton -- for a song, while laying off substantially all of the manufacturing capacity and laying plans to start over from scratch if and when the market in such things improves. While the...

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Most odd

Business owners are losing confidence in the ability of Lord Mandelson's Business Department to help them through the recession.

In order to lose confidence don't you have to have confidence in the first place?

Are there actually any rational business owners who have confidence in the Business Department to do anything other than hinder their efforts?

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Cuba 50 years after the Revolution

Given the love fest that's been going on over at The Guardian (and it gets positively orgiastic if you go further left) about Cuba 50 years after the Revolution I thought I'd just have a peek at some economic statistics to see how well they're doing.

I'll assume that they really do have that top notch free health care and that literacy is indeed just fabulous: although the importance of that in a country where the Government decides what you can read or write somewhat escapes me.

So, this US embargo then, how much of an effect has that had...

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