Against Economic Tide, Norway Thrives

How a tiny African nation provides education, health care for all

(NEWSER) - Imagine a nation that provided free health care and a college education for all its citizens while maintaining a nicely balanced budget. Sound impossible? Well, they’ve managed it in Mauritius, a small island nation off the east coast of Africa with no "exploitable" natural resources to speak of. The country has also ensured that 87% of its populace owns a home—without sparking a housing bubble. In other words, the US could learn a lot from this modest nation, Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz writes for Project Syndicate . More»

Self-dealing artificially propped up market for CDOs

(NEWSER) - An extensive ProPublica investigation reveals what it calls “one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.” Banks, most notably Merrill Lynch, set the stage for the economic meltdown by rewarding themselves for said “self-dealing” during the final two years of the housing bubble. They created “daisy chains” of collateralized debt obligations or CDOs—securities backed by mortgages that became increasingly difficult to sell. The result? Banks created fake demand by buying the CDOs themselves, thus ensuring their generous bonuses would be preserved. More»

(NEWSER) - Pope Benedict delivers a broad criticism of contemporary capitalism in his latest encyclical, the Washington Post reports. The biggest problem with businesses today is that “they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors,” Benedict writes in the 144-page document. He proposes a radically different economic model in which access to food and water are declared universal human rights, wealthy nations share with poorer ones, and a “world political authority” is set up to help manage things. More»

(NEWSER) - For some, 2009 may be remembered as the year of the Ponzi scheme: Last year, federal regulators prosecuted 13 such scams, but in just the first few months of this year, they’ve already filed 22 cases, reports ABC News. One recent bust is Long Island's Peter Dawson, who stiffed fellow churchgoers, including a man bedridden with lupus and behind on his mortgage payments. More»

(NEWSER) - In a much-touted recent Rasmussen poll, only 53% of Americans said they preferred capitalism to socialism. Among those under 30, that figure fell to 37%. “If you comb the annals of Americans’ ideological preferences, you won’t find figures like these,” writes Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post. What’s behind the red surge? Wall Street’s collapse, certainly, but Meyerson thinks Rush Limbaugh deserves some credit, too. More»