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HOLLYWOOD’s bible, Variety magazine, always refers to France as Gaul, a “land of wine, baguettes and amour”. But America’s media industry may soon start taking France more seriously. The French government is trying to pass a harsh new law that[...]

ON APRIL 1st America's government announced a big increase in taxes on cigarettes. Federal taxes leapt from 39 cents to $1.01 a packet. American smokers also pay state taxes ranging from 17 cents in Missouri to a whopping $2.75 in New York. Anti-smoking[...]

ARIZONA’S attorney-general, Terry Goddard, says he started to worry about American guns ending up in the hands of Mexican drug traffickers two years ago. That was after a meeting in Cuernavaca with Mexico’s attorney-general, Eduardo Medina Mora, who[...]

AS THE first day of the G20 summit in London drew to a close on Wednesday April 1st, the havoc predicted by police had largely failed to materialise. This was partly down to numbers, and in part to canny policing. An estimated 35,000 people took part[...]

IF ONLY the rest of the world were run like China, the global financial crisis would be over much sooner. So the governor of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, implied recently. China, he said, had responded with “prompt, decisive and effective[...]

THE past ten years have dealt a series of blows to efficient-market theory, the idea that asset prices accurately reflect all available information. In the late 1990s dotcom companies with no profits and barely any earnings were valued in billions of[...]

UK government bonds continued to soar this morning after the Bank of England unveiled plans to buy billions of pounds of assets to kick-start the economy yesterday.

AMERICA has been dithering about how to sort out its banking crisis. The market has forced its hand. On the morning of Monday February 23rd a joint statement by banking regulators said that they stood “firmly behind” the banking system and would initiate[...]

HOME to the super-rich, Monte Carlo is the most expensive property market in the world, according to an annual report by Global Property Guide, a research firm. An apartment of 120 square metres cost an average of $47,600 for each square metre in 2008,[...]

MANAGING a crisis as complex as this one has so far called for nuance and pragmatism rather than stridency and principle. Should governments prop up credit markets by offering guarantees or creating bad banks? Probably both. What package of fiscal stimulus[...]