But these matters - Faith, economy & politics inform us all. They won't leave us alone, nor should we leave them alone. They impact us every day - throughout history and today as well.
Today the massive too-big-to-fail banks are hardly doing George Bailey-style loans at all. They are not interested in community lending. They are doing their own proprietary trading—trading for their own accounts—which generally means speculating against local interests.
THE past four years have seen the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the biggest food-price increases since the 1970s. That must surely have swollen the ranks of the poor. Wrong.
When something is in short supply, common sense suggests that it should become more valuable. This intuition is borne out in the market for goods and services as well as the labor market. But could this logic also apply to women?
THE world hit seven billion people last week, and I think I met half of them on the road from New Delhi to Agra here in India. They were on foot, on bicycle, on motor scooters. They were in pickups, dented cars and crammed into motorized rickshaws.
But Punjab today faces a grave economic crisis, the result of years of shoddy governance that have stunted growth and created such a mound of public debt that the state is now seeking a multi-billion dollar bailout from the central government. It also is facing high unemployment, an anomaly in a nation that has the highest economic growth rate of any major nation after China.
It's a well-established fact that things — especially bad or troublesome things — almost always come in threes. In other words, if you've just stretched your line of credit to cover a costly car repair, you can pretty much count on one of your kids getting expelled from school and a demotion at work.
