
Daniel Griswold
As of this writing, separate military offensives by Syrian government forces and jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) were advancing rapidly on the city of Aleppo, the key remaining urban stronghold of the secular rebel FSA, which was forced to relinquish control of the city of Homs earlier this year. The loss of Aleppo likely will prove to be the death knell of the FSA.
President Obama recently hosted the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. He welcomed over 40 African heads of state and their outsized entourages to what was a festive affair. Indeed, even the Ebola virus in West Africa failed to dampen spirits in the nation’s capital. Perhaps it was the billions of dollars in African investment, announced by America’s great private companies, that was so uplifting.
Monthly U.S. headlines trumpeting the death of inflation hide a painful truth for American families: rapidly rising food prices. News reports rarely mention this pain because the economists’ preferred inflation metric, so-called “core CPI,” omits both food and energy due to concerns about their volatility.
The rally in U.S. Treasuries this year is due in large part to China’s continued appetite for longer-term U.S. government debt. In the first five months of this year, China bought $107 billion of Treasury debt maturing in more than one year, up from $81 billion for all of 2013. That pace is the fastest on record and has put downward pressure on yields even in the face of the Federal Reserve’s decision to end quantitative easing by October.
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