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The FDA is cracking down on antibiotics on farms. Here’s what you should know.

On Mundell-Fleming (Very Wonkish)

In its announcement, the academy recalled Alfred Nobel’s desire that his prize be awarded for something that benefited humankind, noting that one-fourth of the world’s electrical energy consumption goes to producing light.

Worse than the 1930s: Europe’s recession is really a depression

Statistics on Military Spending

For several months, IBM has been seeking to sell its chip-manufacturing operations

The most likely buyer is GlobalFoundries, a large contract chip manufacturer, the person said, for a price of probably less than $2 billion.

Ms. Rometty stated that while IBM’s priorities were in fields like data analytics and cloud computing, and it had agreed to sell its industry-standard computer server business to Lenovo of China for $2.3 billion, she added: “But let me be clear — we are not exiting hardware.”

These are the companies abandoning the U.S. to dodge taxes

France Banned Free Shipping. So Amazon Made It Cost One Cent.

France's fun didn't last long. With the law officially in effect, Amazon announced that it is indeed complying with the terms and charging for shipping—a full one cent.

Where Amazon can't shirk the law so easily is in its second provision: that online retailers can no longer legally discount the price of books.

Weidmann said the policies of austerity he supported would work slowly but staying the course was important. To him, a lost generation of young workers, who were denied skilled training and out of work for several years, is a matter for individual countries. He cannot see that sovereign states under the current arrangements are denied the funds to invest and improve productivity over the longer term. He cannot see that austerity, if only for this reason, is self-defeating.

George Soros: Russia Could Default & Disrupt Global Markets; Europe Must Rescue Ukraine

Fundamental to the argument that Spain (or Greece, or anyone else) has a moral obligation to repay in full its debt to Germany are two assumptions. The first assumption is that “Spain” borrowed the money from “Germany”, and that there is a collective obligation on the part of Spain to repay the German collective. The second assumption is that Spain had a choice in what it could do with the German money that poured into the country, and so it must be held responsible for its having mis-used hard-earned german funds.

There was plenty of irresponsible behavior in every country, and it is absurd to think that if German and Spanish banks were pouring nearly unlimited amounts of money into countries at extremely low or even negative real interest rates, especially once these initial inflows had set off stock market and real estate booms, that there was any chance that these countries would not respond in the way every country in history, including Germany in the 1870s and in the 1920s, had responded under similar conditions.

The winners have been banks, owners of assets, and business owners, mainly in Germany, whose profits were much higher during the last decade than they could possibly have been otherwise

Michael Pettis explains the euro crisis (and a lot of other things, too) Matthew C Klein | Feb 06 08:30 | 53 comments | Share Share this on Twitter Facebook Google+ LinkedIn StumbleUpon Reddit Th

Why Switzerland’s currency is going historically crazy

Martin Wolf’s Warning

Why the euro crisis still isn’t over, in 1 chart

So why hasn't Europe gotten a real — or any — recovery? Well, it's the debt, stupid.

Every euro that the private sector spends on paying back what it owes is a euro that gets sucked out of the economy.

Traffic Snarls Expected in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber

Several of Europe’s largest cities were snarled by traffic jams on Wednesday when thousands of taxi drivers blocked roads and held rallies in protest of ​an upstart​ American​ service that lets customers book rides through smartphones.

Founded in 2009

Statistics in Argentina

A snapshot of Nigeria’s economy in 1990 gave little or no weight to fast-growing parts of the economy such as mobile telephony or the movie industry. At the time the state-owned telephone company had a few hundred thousand customers. Today the country has 120m mobile-phone subscriptions. On the old 1990 figures, the telecoms sector was less than 1% of GDP; it is now almost 9% of GDP. Motion pictures had not shown up at all in the old figures, but the industry’s size is now put at 1.4% of GDP.

The oil industry’s share of GDP is now put at just 14%, compared with 33% according to the old figures.