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The best explanation, I think, lies in the debt overhang. For the most part, even those who correctly diagnosed a housing bubble failed to notice or at least to acknowledge the importance of the sharp rise in household debt that accompanied the bubble:

Finally, nobody really anticipated the disastrous response of policy, above all the squeeze on public spending at a time when we needed more government spending to sustain the economy until private balance sheets were repaired.

Yellen (and many other people, myself included) underestimated the fragility of the financial system, but also the importance of household debt, and, above all, the foolishness of policymakers.

31 October 2013 Last updated at 19:42 ET Share this page Email Print Share this page2.6KShareFacebookTwitter Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); Jerry Smith, OPCW: "We have... observed all of the destruction activities" Continue reading the main story Syria conflict Arms destruction Chemical stockpile 'Please let it be over' Assad opponents Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says. This comes a day before the deadline set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The weapons have been placed under seal, an OPCW spokesman said. Inspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas. Continue reading the main story Analysis Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent The achievement of this crucial initial target is an important moment for the chemical weapons destruction effort in Syria. The inspectors' first task was to move swiftly to prevent the government from producing any more chemical agent and to destroy facilities and equipment used for mixing agents and filling munitions. Production facilities will be closely monitored to ensure that there are no moves to repair them. The next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. All sorts of questions are raised. Where will this destruction be carried out ? Who will provide the necessary equipment and so on? Western intelligence agencies will be studying Syria's declarations carefully. They will be eager to direct inspectors to additional locations if there are any grounds to believe that Damascus has been less than frank in its disclosures. The inspections were agreed between Russia and the US after Washington threatened to use force in Syria. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad

Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says.

nspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas.

Spurred by a sense of injustice that has lingered for two centuries, the countries plan to compile an inventory of the lasting damage they believe they suffered and then demand an apology and reparations from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands.

“Our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism,” said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in July this year. Reparations, he said, must be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism.

“What happened in the Caribbean and West Africa was so egregious we feel that bringing a case in the I.C.J. would have a decent chance of success,” Mr. Day said. “The fact that you were subjugating a whole class of people in a massively discriminatory way has no parallel,” he added.

Large parts of Syria have been hit by a power cut following an explosion near the airport in the capital, Damascus.

Residents say the entire capital has been plunged into darkness and officials said the power cuts had been nationwide.

"A terrorist attack on a gas pipeline that feeds a power station in the south has led to a power outage in the provinces, and work to repair it is in progress," Syria's state news agency Sana quoted Electricity Minister Imad Khamis as saying.

Olcott wants to know how to measure the return on investment for attention spent, so that individuals could determine how to invest attention rather than merely expend it.

I wonder if our awareness of attention as a quantity to spend is the problem, burdening us with a kind of reflexivity that cannibalizes our experience of being engrossed in an activit

Olcott brings up the received wisdom that our sense of the scarcity of our attention is a product of the sudden information surfeit, which has made us aware of how little time we have for the information we want to consume, or—the same thing—the elasticity of our curiosity when information becomes cheap. Olcott has even attempted to quantify this: “the flow of information clamoring for attention has been increasing at somewhere between 30 and 60 percent per year for the past two decades, while our ability to absorb information has been growing at only about 5 percent per year (and that primarily through our growing tendency to multitask, or do several things superficially rather than one or two things deeply).”

an insidious historical myth: that the reparations and other treaty measures were so odious that they made Adolf Hitler’s rise and World War II inevitable

In truth, the reparations, as the name suggests, were not intended as a punishment. They were meant to repair the damage done, mainly to Belgium and France, by the German invasion and subsequent four years of fighting. They would also help the Allies pay off huge loans they had taken to finance the war, mainly from the United States. At the Paris peace talks of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was very clear that there should be no punitive fines on the losers, only legitimate costs. The other major statesmen in Paris, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, reluctantly agreed,

The fact is that Germany could have managed to pay, but for political reasons chose not to.

One of America’s leading political scientists, Robert Putnam, has just come out with a book called “Our Kids” about the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school-educated America

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that can be inherited.

The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.

a technique invented in 2012 makes it possible to edit the genome precisely and with much greater ease. The technique has already been used to edit the genomes of mice, rats and monkeys, and few doubt that it would work the same way in people.

the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency

an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration that new breeds of genetically engineered potato and apple are safe to eat. Which they probably are, as are the genetically engineered papayas we’ve been eating for some time. In fact, to date there’s little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health

unlike Europeans, Canadians, Australians and others, we don’t subscribe to the precautionary principle, which maintains that it’s better to prevent damage than repair it.

WASHINGTON — Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.

“I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.

A Republican U.S. senator from Utah is holding up a federal funding package worth more than $100 million which could help address the issue of high lead levels found in Flint’s water, saying in a statement on Friday that no federal aid is needed at this time.

U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both D-Mich., represented a “federalizing” of water infrastructure, objected to the bill, arguing the state has not directly asked Congress for any emergency spending and has its own surplus to spend if it needs money.

Stabenow, who worked with Peters for weeks to secure a group of Republican and Democratic cosponsors for the legislation, expressed surprise that Lee has placed a hold on the measure, which effectively keeps the Senate from voting on it, even though it is fully paid for.

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says

Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997

The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

ISIS’s Capital Still Hasn’t Been Cut Off

The distance from the Syrian city of Raqqa to Iraq’s Mosul is about 230 miles as the crow flies, and closer to 280 miles if one drives between the two “capitals” controlled by the self-declared Islamic State

As The Guardian reported in mid-November: “Although heavily targeted throughout the campaign, ISIS has kept a supply line between Raqqa and Mosul largely open. The highway, in particular, has been a major conduit for trade and the flow of fighters.”

For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order.

Economists tend to prefer policies that work across the entire economy at once by integrating the costs of climate change into the price of gas, food, and other consumer goods. But voters—who have more quotidian concerns than optimally elegant economic policy—don’t always feel the same way. They don’t want gas prices to go up. And that means they support policies that remake one sector of the economy at a time, usually by mandating the use of technology. Economists like to disparage these policies as “kludges” or “command and control.” But Americans like them

climate policy’s Boring as Dirt problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is an interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often dull. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane.

a dinosaur looking up into the heavens at night, at all the twinkling stars. His smiling face utters the words: “The dot that gets bigger and bigger each night is my favorite.”

The most striking thing about Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in the New York Times was not its banal defense of the principle of scientific skepticism, but its general lameness. Rereading it this week, it is striking how modest its claims were. They essentially came to this: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

The denialists, in other words, have nothing left

After the Cold War, Americans assumed that no other country could match the United States in its military might and technological leadership. The reality, long known in the military, is that defense-modernization programs in Russia and China, as well as advances in Iran and North Korea, threaten to leapfrog U.S. capabilities.

The military plays two essential roles in defending U.S. international goals. The first is to deter aggression that would jeopardize American interests, because potential adversaries believe their chances of prevailing are slim to none. The second is to fight — and to win — wars to protect those same interests. In both cases, the United States’ military is on a downward trajectory.

read the recent report of the congressionally created National Defense Strategy Commission, a group of civilian experts and retired military officers.

think of all the other things we could have done with $2 trillion — all the infrastructure we could have built and repaired, all the people who could have been given essential health care.What a colossal, corrupt waste.

Firstly, I’m relieved as an American that a serious and dogged prosecutor deemed it impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president of the United States had knowingly conspired with a foreign government to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election

Second, we were able to hold an independent inquiry into a serious question of electoral malfeasance and see it to a conclusion, without Mueller being fired, or the inquiry blocked, or stymied

More to the point, in what was an inevitably fraught political moment, Robert Mueller conducted himself impeccably.

It is that the racial divide doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience.

One way to capture it is to say that the other divides are born out of separation and inequality, but the racial divide is born out of sin. We don’t talk about sin much in the public square any more. But I don’t think one can grasp the full amplitude of racial injustice without invoking the darkest impulses of human nature.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Mr. Cuomo estimated on Monday that the state could raise $9 billion in bonds off that revenue that would help fund repairs for the city’s troubled subway system. But the philosophical and psychological impact might be even more profound, offering a concrete, almost classist, rebuke to ultra-wealthy apartment buyers who sojourn in the city, enjoying its services and amenities, but often pay few taxes.

“There’s a growing realization with Billionaires’ Row, and the super-talls, that a lot of these homes are vacant and viewed as sky-high security deposit boxes for very wealthy foreigners,” said State Senator Brad Hoylman, the Manhattan Democrat who has sponsored the tax legislation for several years. And, he said, “because of our system of laws, because of our fire and police, because we are a secure financial investment, they should be charged for that.”

The speed with which the pied-à-terre tax has become politically popular is also remarkable: The idea was floated by a liberal think tank and lawmakers in New York in 2014, but had repeatedly been shunted to death in committee by Republicans leading Albany’s upper chamber, and quietly ignored by Democrats leading the Assembly.