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In 2011, Mr. Bernanke, a staunch proponent of transparency as a tenet of monetary policy, gave the first scheduled news conference by a chairman in Fed history. His comments to reporters went beyond mere openness; he expressed remarkable candor and established, albeit tentatively, the basis for a regular rapport with the public.

By the late 1990s a vast majority of the central banks had begun to incorporate elements of inflation targeting. The aim is to shape the expectations around the most fundamental dynamic of market economies: the evolution of prices. The experiments relied on theories going back decades. As far back as the 1930s, the economists Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes proposed that price behavior was based in large part on expectations.

A senior official of the European Central Bank, Benoît Coeuré, said in a speech last year that monetary stability was “a cornerstone of the social contract.” Fed officials who remember the high inflation of the 1970s, brought under control by Mr. Greenspan’s predecessor, Paul A. Volcker, pretty much agree.

For regulators, the headache comes with finding practical ways to distinguish proprietary trading from the more legitimate practices. If they wrote the exemptions for market making and hedging too loosely, the banks might find loopholes. If they made them too strict, banks might not be able to engage in activities that Congress had said were permissible.

The final version is expected to contain a provision that requires bank chief executives to attest that they are not doing proprietary trading, officials say,  a victory for the rule’s supporters. The tougher version of this provision would have a chief executive make this certification in the bank’s public securities filings, which are audited and are expected to have a high degree of accuracy. A more modest version would have the executive attest to a bank’s board of directors.

The Volcker Rule also addresses traders’ compensation. The final wording is likely to require that traders engaged in market making and hedging not be paid on the basis of simply how much money their units made. Instead, the risks involved in taking positions would also have to be considered.

ince the Volcker Rule was first proposed in 2011, regulators have had to contend with a fierce lobbying campaign by the banks. But that effort lost momentum last year, after JPMorgan’s trading debacle revealed that its traders were placing enormous speculative bets under the guise of hedging.

the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing.

Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?

there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.

the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all

if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.

material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness.

Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism.

In the 2008 presidential race, the Iraq 'debate' was largely fought over who was right about the surge.

We all sort of know that the ground has shifted on this issue. We can see it clearly in public opinion polls. But it is as though it's been years since we actually had a show of hands - especially among national Republicans. Good idea? Bad idea? As I was writing this, Jeb Bush himself has now come forward and, on the fourth try, said the Iraq War was a mistake. What I've called that showing of hands seems to show virtually no one of any consequence standing up for the decision to invade. Maybe we all kind of knew that that was where people had gotten to. But seeing people say it is a transformative event.

the ground has shifted not just on the facts of the issue, but on what is in many ways a more consequential front: Time has passed and Republicans simply don't feel the same sort of partisan responsibility for the conflict. It's drifting back into history. The sense of ideological and partisan commitment has just loosened - the intuitive reflex that says our guy did it so it must be right and I need to defend it

Cruz and Rubio especially are fighting for base Republicans. If they were still committed to the wisdom of the Iraq War, they wouldn't be saying this. And yet they are. That is a major watershed in the country's reckoning with the war. If Republicans running as hawks say it was a mistake, then the debate is really over.

with a consensus in place that the Iraq War was a bad idea, the whys and hows of just how we made this decision are up for discussion in a very new way.

While in the south lower caste members concentrated on economic development and education as a route to prosperity, in the north the chief aim of caste-based groups has been political power and its spoils. As a result India’s northern lower castes tend to be less educated and less prosperous than their southern counterparts.

Unlike northern India, where caste-based political movements are a fairly recent phenomenon, lower castes in southern India began agitating against upper-caste domination at the beginning of the 20th century. Because these movements arose before independence and the possibility of elected political power, they focused on issues like dignity, education, and self-reliance, Mr. Varshney said. Nadars created business associations to provide entrepreneurs with credit they could not get from banks. They started charities to pay for education for poor children. They built their own temples and marriage halls to avoid upper caste discrimination. “Our community focused on education, not politics,” said R. Chandramogan, a Nadar entrepreneur who built India’s largest privately owned dairy company from scratch. “We knew that with education, we could accomplish anything.”

The north put in place affirmative action policies, but because education was widely embraced, southern people from lower castes were better able to take advantage of these opportunities than northerners. When India’s economy liberalized in the 1990s, the south was far more prepared to take advantage of globalization, said Samuel Paul of the Public Affairs Center, a research institution that has looked closely at the growing divide between north and south India. “The south was ready,” Mr. Paul said.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,”

The researchers find that hit songs in the 1980s were more likely to emphasize happy togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory” and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.” Diana Ross and Lionel Richie sang of “two hearts that beat as one,” and John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” emphasized the preciousness of “our life together.” Today’s songs, according to the researchers’ linguistic analysis, are more likely be about one very special person: the singer. “I’m bringing sexy back,” Justin Timberlake proclaimed in 2006. The year before, Beyoncé exulted in how hot she looked while dancing — “It’s blazin’, you watch me in amazement.” And Fergie, who boasted about her “humps” while singing with the Black Eyed Peas, subsequently released a solo album in which she told her lover that she needed quality time alone: “It’s personal, myself and I.”

a meta-analysis published last year in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Dr. Twenge and Joshua D. Foster looked at data from nearly 50,000 students — including the new data from critics — and concluded that narcissism has increased significantly in the past three decades.

Their song-lyrics analysis shows a decline in words related to social connections and positive emotions (like “love” or “sweet”) and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior (like “hate” or “kill”).

"Interviews with more than two dozen Republican activists, elected officials and contributors around the country reveal little appetite for another Romney candidacy,"

"Beyond his enthusiasts - a formidable constituency given that many are donors - opinions range from indifference to open hostility."

"If Mitt Romney is the answer, what is the question?"

one that doesn't come immediately to mind is who would be the best Republican presidential nominee in 2016."

"Mr Romney is a man of admirable personal character, but his political profile is, well, protean,

"But I know lots of honourable, capable and decent people. I don't want them to run for president either."

He predicts Mr Romney's campaign won't gain traction, and the former governor will have to withdraw sometime between the first caucus in Iowa and New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary.

"If Romney runs now and finishes as an afterthought, it'll be one more sign that the whiz kid couldn't read the tea leaves placed before him despite 20 years of practice in electoral politics

A 56 percent majority of the younger group of Democrats believes that “Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts,” with just 36 percent believing that Wall Street hurts the economy. Older Democrats have almost exactly the opposite view. 56 percent believe that Wall Street hurts the economy; 36 percent believe it helps.

Asked by Pew to choose between two statements — “Racial discrimination is the main reason why many blacks can’t get ahead” and “Blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition” – the older Democratic cohort blamed discrimination, by an 80 to 10 margin. In contrast, only 19 percent of the younger group of Democrats blamed discrimination, with 68 percent saying that blacks “are mostly responsible for their own condition.”

Some 91 percent of the older group said the “U.S. needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights,” and just 6 percent said the “U.S. has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights.” 67 percent of the younger group said the United States has done enough for blacks, and 28 percent said that the country needs to do more to give blacks equal rights.

When asked by Reason if they would consider voting for Clinton, 53 percent of those surveyed said yes, and 27 percent said no. Both Joe Biden, the vice president, and Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, received more yeses than noes.

every one of the prospective Republican presidential candidates pollsters mentioned — Christie, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal — received more noes than yeses from millennials, by margins ranging from two noes for every yes to four noes for every yes

By a margin of 70-35, millennials in the Reason survey chose “competition is primarily good; it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas” over “competition is primarily harmful; it brings out the worst in people.” By 64-25, millennials picked “profit is generally good because it encourages businesses to provide valued products to attract customers” as opposed to “profit is generally bad because it encourages businesses to take advantage of their customers and employees.”

In some other respects, the millennial voters studied by Reason appear to hold orthodox liberal views: they support more spending to help the poor, even if it means higher taxes; government action to guarantee a living wage, enough for everyone to eat and have a place to sleep; and a government guarantee of health insurance. Conversely, majorities of the same voters believe that wealth should be distributed according to achievement as opposed to need, and that “people should be allowed to keep what they produce, even if there are others with greater needs.”

“You may have issue differences within the Democratic Party, but they become irrelevant when confronted by a Republican Party determined to turn elections into cultural conflicts,” Greenberg said in a phone interview. “These differences don’t matter in the context of a Republican party that brings out the commonality of the Democratic Party.”

Money, in Leege’s view, will be likely to trump the demographic trends favoring Democrats. Continue reading the main story 378 Comments Leege raises a fundamental question. The Democratic Party could well gain strength politically as it edges away from economic liberalism to a coalition determined to protect personal liberties from conservative moral constraint.

Corporate America faces a divided Democratic Party, vulnerable to the kind of lobbying pressures that the business elite specializes in. Under this scenario, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce will enjoy increased leverage in the policy-making arenas of Congress and the executive branch despite – or even because – of Democratic political success.

Then there’s health reform, where Republicans were very clear about what was supposed to happen: minimal enrollments, more people losing insurance than gaining it, soaring costs. Reality, so far, has begged to differ, delivering above-predicted sign-ups, a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, premiums well below expectations, and a sharp slowdown in overall health spending.

the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.

Since then, however, over-the-top warnings about the evils of debt and deficits have become a routine part of Republican rhetoric; and even conservatives occasionally admit that soaring inequality is a problem.

Moreover, it’s harder than ever to claim that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. At this point the private sector has added more than twice as many jobs under President Obama as it did over the corresponding period under W, a period that doesn’t include the Great Recession.

The Bush administration’s determination to dismantle any restraints on banks — at one staged event, a top official used a chain saw on stacks of regulations — looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives have bought into the thoroughly debunked narrative that government somehow caused the Great Recession, and all of the Republican candidates have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank, the fairly modest set of regulations imposed after the financial crisis.

You might think, then, that Bush-style tax cuts would be out of favor. In fact, however, establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did. And independent analysis of Jeb’s proposal shows that it’s even more tilted toward the wealthy than anything his brother did.

The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. True, Ted Cruz is alone among the top contenders in calling explicitly for a return to the gold standard — you could say that he wants to Cruzify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Sorry.) But where the Bush administration once endorsed “aggressive monetary policy” to fight recessions, these days hostility toward the Fed’s efforts to help the economy is G.O.P. orthodoxy, even though the right’s warnings about imminent inflation have been wrong again and again.

Last but not least, there’s foreign policy. You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war, where we were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, where a vast expenditure of blood and treasure left the Middle East less stable than before, would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is more or less universal among the leading candidates. And let’s not forget that back when Jeb Bush was considered the front-runner, he assembled a foreign-policy team literally dominated by the architects of debacle in Iraq

The point is that while the mainstream contenders may have better manners than Mr. Trump or the widely loathed Mr. Cruz, when you get to substance it becomes clear that all of them are frighteningly radical, and that none of them seem to have learned anything from past disasters.

The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the party’s nod.

The pilfered art was collected by Hildebrand Gurlitt, the so-called "art dealer to the Führer," who was tasked by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's head of propaganda, to sell art that the Nazis confiscated.

Instead, it seems Gurlitt collected the art and kept about a billion dollars worth of drawings and paintings throughout the war, reports Philip Oltermann for the Guardian.

The collection, including pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann and Paul Klee, was hidden away in the flat of Grulitt's son, Cornelius Gurlitt. Officials were first alerted to the art after Cornelius was put under investigation for tax evasion.

Among the works whose histories have been traced, four have been restored to the families of their original owners. They include an oil painting by Max Liebermann, “Two Riders on a Beach,” that sold for $2.9 million at auction, and a portrait by Matisse, “Femme Assise,” or “Seated Woman/Woman Sitting in an Armchair,” that was given to the descendants of Paul Rosenberg. Other restored works include a Pissarro and a drawing by Carl Spitzweg.

Though just these five works have been traced so far, the group has determined that 499 works have "a questionable history," the Reuters report adds. The German Lost Art Foundation, who oversaw the task force, announced that a new phase of the project will begin this month that will continue to seek the original homes for those works still in the government's custody.

This debate doesn't have much to do with the merits of torture as an intelligence-gathering mechanism: The evidence that torture doesn't work is overwhelming. Rather, the debate among four leading Republicans over the practice is all about politics, both inside the Republican Party and more broadly.

Cruz, for example, has said that waterboarding does not constitute torture, but also that he would not "bring it back in any sort of widespread use" and has co-sponsored legislation limiting its use.

Well, under the definition of torture, no, it's not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.

international law, under both the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, considers waterboarding a form of torture and thus illegal.

A January 2005 Gallup poll found that 82 percent of Americans believed "strapping prisoners on boards and forcing their heads underwater until they think they are drowning" was an immoral interrogation tactic.

In 2007, 40 percent of Americans favored waterboarding suspected terrorists in a CNN poll, while 58 percent opposed. By 2014, 49 percent told CBS that they believed waterboarding could be at least sometimes justified, while only 36 percent said it never could be.

Today, 73 percent of Republicans support torturing suspected terrorists, according to Pew.

Any Republican who took a strong stance against waterboarding or other torture techniques could be pegged as weak on terrorism — a damning charge in a Republican primary that's been preoccupied with ISIS.

Reminder: Torture is morally abhorrent and also doesn't work

Some proponents will claim that while morally regrettable, torture is nonetheless necessary to keep us safe. But the best evidence suggests that it this is a false choice: Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, does not work.

In most cases, torture is used by authoritarian states to force false confessions

The evidence that torture did not aid the hunt for Osama bin Laden is particularly compelling.

In other words, some GOP candidates' pro-torture sentiment isn't just a relic of Bush-era partisan debates — it's also totally out of whack with everything we know about the practice of torture today.