Felix Salmon

Back in late May, Tim Geithner literally brandished the Constitution of the United States while declaring — quite rightly — that it is unconstitutional to question US debt payments. A few commentators, Bruce Bartlett among them, reckon that this sets up a possible highly-dramatic endgame to the debt-ceiling negotiations:

The president would have constitutional authority to take extraordinary measures to protect the public credit and prevent a debt default even if it means disregarding the debt limit, which is statutory law subordinate to the Constitution…

According to a June 28 report in the Huffington Post, Democratic senators, including Chris Coons of Delaware and Patty Murray of Washington, are warming to the constitutional option for breaking the deadlock on the debt limit and preventing a default. At a press conference on Wednesday, President Obama was asked directly about this by Chuck Todd of NBC News and he refused to rule it out. It goes without saying that provoking a constitutional crisis over the debt limit is a bad idea, but a debt crisis would be worse. At a minimum, the Fourteenth Amendment greatly strengthens the president’s hand in getting the debt limit increased in a timely matter. He should not be afraid to use it.

This would be a very dangerous game to play. Congress doesn’t need the debt ceiling to shut down government operations — there’s the budget, too. The 2011 Continuing Resolution expires in less than three month; given that the Republicans in Congress would certainly take any appeal to the Constitution as a declaration of political war, the probability of a government shutdown would skyrocket.

On top of that, the substantive business of government would surely come to an end as the Republicans responded to a Constitutional override with impeachment proceedings of their own, on the grounds that any debt issued without Congressional authorization will have dubious legal standing and could be an impeachable offense. If Obama wanted to guarantee enormous amounts of political heat and absolutely no meaningful legislation getting passed for the remainder of his first term in office, he could hardly go about it a better way.

Which might explain why Geithner hasn’t been pulling a copy of the Constitution out of his breast pocket for the past six weeks or so. When the executive branch doesn’t have control of Congress, it always dreams of some magic machine which will let it simply do what it wants anyway. And in the eyes of many centrists who understandably care about depoliticizing the repayment of government debt, the Constitution is a wonderful gift in that regard. And like most wonderful gifts of lore, this one is best left untouched.

When a country is a serial defaulter, two things happen: it regularly writes down the value of its own debts, and it can’t borrow money anywhere else. The result looks something like this:

The implication of this chart is that Ecuador is finally, perforce, living within its means — something you have to do, if you have no ability to borrow.

Except there’s something the chart doesn’t show: China.

Ecuador’s government on Monday signed a loan for $2 billion with the China Development Bank Corp., Ecuador’s Finance Ministry said, as China deepens its financial ties with the South American nation…

Currently, China’s loans to Ecuador exceed $6 billion, including $1.7 billion to finance 85% of Coca-Codo Sinclair, a hydropower plant to be built by China’s Sinohydro Corp. in Ecuador, which will supply about 75% of the country’s energy needs.

In a country the size of Ecuador, these numbers are huge. The latest newsletter from Ecuador’s Analytica Investments puts them in perspective:

Since the 2008-9 default, which chopped the government’s foreign debt to $7.01 billion, debt has surged 54% to $10.78 billion with the latest deal…

Newspaper El Universo reported that the loan from China’s Development Bank is tied to another 72,000 barrels per day of oil deliveries, citing a memo from the negotiations. That would make Ecuador owe 75% of its oil exports to China, the paper cited opposition legislator Vicente Taiano as saying…

Ecuadorian bankers report that Ecuador wants a $10 billion credit line from China. If that were to happen, Ecuador would owe the Asian giant an extraordinary 24% of GDP.

With the latest deal, Ecuador owes China some $8 billion, or 19% of GDP. That’s more than its total external debt, as measured in the kind of charts which people generally look at when they want to know debt-to-GDP ratios.

This is something which happens when sovereigns default: they risk losing their sovereignty. Ecuador now resembles a wholly-owned subsidiary of China, much like many solvency-challenged yet resource-rich countries in sub-Saharan Africa. And a glance at Greece is enough to see how that country has essentially ceded much sovereignty to the EU.

Not all defaulting countries run into this issue: Argentina still does whatever it wants to do, and is beholden to nobody. But the oldest and loudest complaint about the IMF is that it forces governments to do its bidding in return for providing emergency financial assistance. And compared to the likes of China, the IMF is positively mild in terms of self-serving policy prescriptions. It’s a key reason why governments are well advised to address fiscal problems sooner rather than later. Because if they dally too long, they risk losing their very independence.

It’s rare that I consider Andrew Ross Sorkin too harsh on Wall Street, but today is one of those times.

Sorkin’s thesis, narrowly considered, is undeniable. Wall Street has clout in Congress; because of that clout, it can get bank-friendly provisions inserted into legislation. But the broader thrust of the column is I think misguided: that the legislation is a bad thing, and that it unfairly benefits banks to the detriment of civil society and the rule of law.

It’s worth reading the column in full to feel the force of Sorkin’s disapproval. He quotes five different people in the column, of whom four are fiercely opposed to the legislation. The fifth, Chuck Schumer, is quoted with the construction “has said” — a phrase dripping with condescension and disbelief. (Schumer’s opponents are given the much more straightforward “according to,” “said,” “said,” and “wrote”.) This might be the first and last Sorkin column to ever treat Maxine Waters with more respect than Chuck Schumer.

The provision in question makes it much harder for financial-services firms to enforce what’s known as “business method” patents. These are relatively new animals, and not particularly welcome ones, either. There’s no good reason why financial innovations should be patented, and there’s every reason why they shouldn’t be. Patents are a way of skewing the playing field and giving one player an artificial advantage over everybody else — the exact opposite of how financial markets are meant to work.

There are far too many patents in general, and enforcement of them often resembles a multi-billion-dollar lottery. But at least outside the financial sector there can be good reason for such things to exist: without them, much R&D expenditure would simply cease. But financial companies don’t have R&D budgets, and given the sorry track record of financial innovation that’s probably just as well. What’s more, the more successful financial innovations — mutual funds, say, or venture capital, or even coco bonds, should they turn out to actually work — are very much in the public domain, open for anybody and everybody to copy.

Sorkin’s attempts to defend the idea of financial business-method patents ring pretty hollow. Some companies’ patents might be “put into jeopardy”, he writes, while others will have to spend money on lawyers trying to defend them. Well, yes. That’s the whole point.

The banks “are attempting to write into law what they have been unable to achieve in litigation,” Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, wrote in a letter to colleagues…

Admittedly, it seems somewhat preposterous that simply processing scanned checks, as DataTreasury does, could be a patentable business method. But we have courts, which have upheld these patents, for a reason…

Experts like F. Scott Kieff, a professor at George Washington University Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, worry that the law is too broad…

He is worried about the law’s impact not just on investors in the United States, but also about even broader implications. “When word gets out that intellectual property rights are not being taken seriously in the U.S., especially for any class of patents that can be a convenient political target of powerful, well-heeled interest groups like banks, our voracious international competitors will pounce,” he said.

Sorkin never explains why the law might be bad for “investors in the United States”. Given that investors are the foremost consumers of financial services, one imagines they will be very happy if they no longer have to pay rents to patent holders in order to use those services.

As for those “voracious international competitors”, I have absolutely no idea who they are, what they are going to be pouncing on, or even who they’re supposed to be competing with. This is pure rhetoric, unsupported with any actual analysis; Sorkin does wave his hand at an article published in “a Hoover Institution journal”, but without any kind of link it’s impossible to follow the thread any further.

And Sorkin seems to have forgotten that it’s Congress’s job to make laws, which courts then enforce. If the existing law has gone astray — as patent law clearly has — then Congress has the obligation to set it back on its right and proper path. Section 18 isn’t too broad, it’s too narrow.

But that’s not how Sorkin sees it:

Section 18 represents a much larger issue: It is perhaps the most blatant demonstration of the lobbying power of Wall Street and, just as important, the willingness of Congress to support the interests of the banks, even in the face of clear evidence that the law has no purpose other than to benefit the financial services industry.

Well, yes, the law will benefit the financial services industry. No one is arguing that point. And it will hurt rentiers with patents. The important question is whether it’s a good idea from a public-policy perspective. Sorkin ducks that question entirely. But the fact is that if we want a level playing field in financial services, getting rid of business-method patents is an extremely good idea.

Update: Kevin Drum agrees that business-method patents are a bad idea, but still opposes this bill, in much the same way that some free-trade advocates oppose bilateral trade agreements. I see the point; where you stand on this issue is likely a function of how likely you think wholesale patent reform is.

Neither interviewer nor politician comes across well here but make sure you watch the video — Guardian

Google Loses Access to Twitter Stream, Suspends Realtime Search — Mashable

When (and why) Rape Victims Lie — Sasha Said, see also NYP

How News of the World journalists deleted voicemail messages, raising false hopes Milly Dowler was alive — Guardian

London Has $34B of Luxury Homes in Pipeline — Bloomberg

Nouriel’s been called many things. This may however be the first time he’s been called “economic hepatitis” — LoSC

The technology inside Apple’s $50 Thunderbolt cable — Ars Technica

Chart: percentage of bike commuters who are women, against percentage of commuters who are bike commuters, by city — Tumblr

Princess Charlene of Monaco ‘tried to flee three times’ — Telegraph

Tim Harford on the importance of bank capital — FT

85-year-old NYPD officer kills pedestrian with police van — DNA Info

Itamar Franco is dead — Bloomberg

Google bid pi for Nortel patents and lost — Reuters

NYPD Fireworks Destruction Extravaganza — YouTube

On Attribution and Credit — Daring Fireball

Bob Rubin: don’t blame me, blame the media — Reuters

Zynga has nearly $1 billion in the bank. Obviously not IPOing ‘cos it needs the money — Fortune

y2kurtus leaves an interesting comment, in the context of a world where major sovereign defaults seem increasingly likely:

A topic of great interest the next few weeks will be what is truly the worlds most investable ultra low risk asset. Curently the market says it’s U.S. T-bills and German Euro Bonds.

I’m on the other side of that trade… put my money into ultra-high quality equities which generate meaningful %’s of their earnings in several currencies and whose dividends (untaxable to me in IRA’s) are higher than the 10 year treasury. Like TFF I’m more worried about the dependability of the cashflows than the day to day volitility of the principal.

What y2kurtus is talking about here is stocks like Johnson & Johnson. Its dividend yield is 3.39% — higher than the 10-year Treasury rate of 3.2%. It’s international, and it has very little leverage: total debt to equity is less than 30%.

Such stocks have one clear advantage over any kind of bonds: they’re much less prone to being eaten away by inflation. If you own a company, then you’re selling things which tend to go up in price in line with inflation. And if you own a diversified group of companies, then your inflation risk is much lower than if you own a set of liabilities which are fixed in dollar terms.

And as y2kurtus notes, if the companies are broadly diversified internationally, their stocks should offer decent protection against a plunging currency, too.

On the other hand, when times get tough, companies not only can but should cut their dividends. Just when you need that income most, it’s prone to disappear.

J&J might be paying out 57 cents per quarter right now, but that dividend has been growing at an impressive rate indeed — it was just 5 cents 20 years ago. With hindsight, buying a stock which was going to see its dividend grow by 12% per year compounded would indeed have been a very good idea. (J&J stock was trading at $7.03, adjusted for splits, 20 years ago; it’s $67.30 today.)

But would you have sold the stock by now, if you’d bought back then? One question that y2kurtus leaves open is whether you should sell stocks if and when their dividend yields drop below the 10-year Treasury. JNJ was certainly there — 10 years ago its dividend yield was just 1.4%, when the 10-year Treasury was yielding 5.4%. (And indeed, over the past 10 years, you would have been better off in long-dated Treasuries than in J&J.)

More generally, if J&J’s dividends can go up enormously over time, they can go down enormously over time as well. Companies fail. And on an individual-company basis, there’s no dividend in the world which is remotely as dependable as the coupons on Treasury securities. Even on a diversified basis, dividends are — and should be — cyclical, going up in good times and down in bad times. Which is the exact opposite of what you’d ideally want from an investment. Dividend cashflows have a nasty habit of being “dependable”, in other words, only up until the point at which you actually want to start depending on them.

Remember BP?

BP and Shell between them account for 50% of the dividends paid by UK companies every year. It seems quaint, but there really are a lot of far-from-wealthy people in the UK who live off their dividend income, and those people constitute a surprisingly large part of BP’s shareholder base. If BP suspends its dividend, the only way they can get money from their stock is by selling it.

These small investors didn’t care about volatility of principal at all, so long as they kept on getting their dividends. But the minute that the dividend disappeared, the volatility of the principal became hugely important. And even if you didn’t need to sell your BP shares when it suspended its dividend, any dividend-stock investor would feel a bit of a chump holding onto shares which weren’t paying a dividend at all.

On top of all that, there are good reasons why companies should not declare large dividends, and should spend the money on stock buybacks instead. Why force all your investors to declare dividend income, when buybacks are an elegant way of returning money to the shareholders who want it, while allowing those who don’t to benefit from a smaller float? So long as capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes, a lot of shareholders will be quietly encouraging companies to go the buyback route rather than the dividend route.

So if you’re looking for the worlds most investable ultra low risk asset, I’m not convinced that a portfolio of high-dividend stocks is necessarily the way to go. It just doesn’t make sense to me that an asset which can lose all its cashflows and half its value overnight could ever be considered “ultra low risk”, no matter how sanguine you are about price volatility. And even though you can diversify, that doesn’t tend to work very well during crises.

Still, there is one good thing about holding stocks as part of a low-risk portfolio: you can’t kid yourself that there’s no risk there at all. Debt is treacherous, and hides its risks; with stocks, the risks are out there in the open for all to see. Nothing would be better for reducing the amount of systemic tail risk in the economy than seeing a large number of people coming around to the idea that stocks are safer than bonds. So I applaud y2kurtus for his asset allocation. And maybe, if we see some catastrophic bond defaults, others will follow suit. And we’ll see the kind of painful yet necessary deleveraging which we needed after the financial crisis but failed to get.

I respect, in theory, the way that Village Voice Media has decided to try and bring some quantifiable common sense to the question of how many underage prostitutes there are in the US. The main thesis of the 4,400-word article is compelling: the universally slung-around statistic that the number is between 100,000 and 300,000 is downright false.

VVM is open about the fact that it has a dog in this fight: a significant portion of its revenues come from adult classified ads, both in print and online. But its detailed reporting shows three different ways how far the crusaders against underage prostitution have veered into scaremongering.

First is that 100,000 to 300,000 figure, repeated ad nauseam in respectable outlets and largely uncontested. The original source of the number turns out to be a non-peer-reviewed paper from 2001 which attempts to add up all the children “‘at risk’ of commercial sexual exploitation” — a number which includes enormous numbers of children who will never become prostitutes at all:

These estimates reported in Exhibit ES.2a reflect what we believe to the number of children in the United States “at risk” of commercial sexual exploitation, i.e., children who because of their unique circum- stances as runaways, thrownaways, victims of physical or sexual abuse, users of psychotropic drugs, members of sexual minority groups, illegally trafficked children, children who cross international borders in search of cheap drugs and sex, and other illicit fare, are at special risk of sexual exploitation. The numbers presented in these exhibits do not, therefore, reflect the actual number of cases of the CSEC in the United States but, rather, what we estimate to be the number of children “at risk” of commercial sexual exploitation.

The choice of scare quotes here is a bit weird, until you read the VVM story, which talks to David Finkelhor, professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and director of Crimes Against Children Research Center. Finkelhor read an early draft of the paper and encouraged the authors to add in the “at risk” language: originally, it wasn’t there at all. Finkelhor also says that the paper “has no scientific credibility”.

But what’s undeniable is that the numbers in the paper include every child who ever runs away from home, even for a day or two; it’s silly to use them as a guide to the actual number of child prostitutes.

I do think that the VVM story should have linked to the paper — and, too, should have mentioned that the 100,000 to 300,000 range doesn’t actually appear anywhere in it. They do keep a running tally of the number of children at risk, and then multiply it by 88% to get a “medium scenario”, and by 75% to get a “low scenario”. The “medium scenario” ends up at 286,506 kids, while the “low scenario” is 244,181.

Importantly, the multipliers don’t seek to correct for the possibility that the estimates might be too high; they only seek to correct for double-counting, where the same kid appears in more than one of the 14 different at-risk categories. If you wanted to come up with a lower bound, one easy way to do that would be to simply add up categories 1, 3, and 4: runaway youth from home, runaway youth from juvenile and other institutions, and homeless children not elsewhere counted. Those three categories don’t overlap, and if you add them up you get to 156,676.

If you used this paper to generate a range of numbers, then, the obvious range would be 150,000 to 300,000 — something like that. It’s not at all clear where the 100,000 number comes from, although it might conceivably be something to do with this:

At the time of completing work on this report, a new study of the incidence of runaway and throw- naway children in the United States (NISMART 2) was nearing completion (Hanson, 2000). Inasmuch as 60% of all the children we estimate to be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation fall within the “run- away” and “thrownaway” categories (Rows 1, 2 and 3 of Exhibit ES.2a), the findings from this updated national incidence study of runaway and thrownaway children—but not directly of children involved in commercial sexual exploitation— is expected to have a significant impact on our estimates of the number of children at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. Preliminary discussions with investigators associ- ated with NISMART-2 suggest that the number of runaway and thrownaway children may have declined by as much as 30%-40% between 1988 and 2000.

In any case, the paper nowhere says or implies that it is generating an estimate for the total number of underage prostitutes. That reading got added on later, probably by someone reading a second- or third-hand report of what the paper says.

VVM could have stopped there, but they didn’t. Rather than simply debunk the number they found, they ran their own numbers, by looking at how many children were arrested for prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities over the past ten years. (The 2001 paper took a similar geographical approach: it was based on numbers from just 17 US cities.) It turns out that over the course of a decade, there were just 8,263 arrests — 826 per year. No matter how low the proportion of child prostitutes who end up getting arrested any given year, there’s no way that a universe of more than 100,000 prostitutes could generate a mere 826 arrests.

And then, most tellingly, VVM looked at the size of the child-prostitution industry — not the illegal part, but the legal bit.

In 2005 and 2006, the federal government spent $50 million primarily to fund law enforcement task forces involving U.S. Attorneys, local police, FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents, and various nonprofits. The task forces were created to put an end to sex and labor trafficking in America. Today, there are more than 40 such task forces, from Boston to Anchorage, each typically funded with $450,000 for three-year terms…

The Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces, also composed of local and federal law enforcement agencies, have investigated child pornography and prostitution cases since 1998. Generally, the units receive tens of millions of dollars annually. As part of the government stimulus package, Uncle Sam handed out $75 million to ICAC groups in 2009.

In the past eight years, Congress has spent $200 million on child pornography in America and another $180 million on all domestic trafficking involving sex or labor.

The wording here (“Congress has spent $200 million on child pornography”) might be a bit unfortunate, but the point is a good one: all of this money has managed to find somewhere between 100 and 250 underage prostitutes per year. And when they’re found, they’re often arrested, rather than being given access to the help they need:

Seattle is one of the few places in the nation with a shelter devoted to underage prostitutes. Despite the obvious need, the city manages the program without federal funding…

Although Congress has spent hundreds of millions in tax-generated money to fight human trafficking, it has yet to spend a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, underage prostitutes.

The VVM story, then, finds and demolishes the stated number, gets an empirical basis for the actual number, and makes a powerful point about how current initiatives are a way of spending too much money on exactly the wrong thing. If there were hundreds of thousands of underage prostitutes in the US, then the Congressional appropriations would make sense. But given the actual numbers, that money would be much better spent on shelters.

There are, however, big weaknesses with the piece. For one, it gratuitously attacks Ashton Kutcher, a smart person who’s making the world a better place, in an unpleasantly ad hominem manner. Kutcher is not the problem here. And it needs a lot more serious discussion of VVM’s own ethics with regard to running adult classifieds, including classifieds which turn out to be advertising underage prostitutes. You can argue about the efficacy of Kutcher’s campaign, but he’s not making the problem worse. VVM, meanwhile, is a non-negligible part of the problem, and needs be a lot more honest about its own place in the child-prostitution ecosystem.

The result of all this has been a destructive Twitter war with Kutcher, which has already resulted, among other things, in American Airlines pulling ads from VVM websites. VVM, in other words, could hardly have engineered a higher heat-to-light ratio if they’d tried. All of which makes the article look less a serious investigation, and more a noxious publicity stunt. If VVM is willing to examine its own behavior with regard to child prostitution in detail, then this road might have been well worth traveling. But if they just want to take potshots at Ashton Kutcher, I do wonder whether they will ultimately achieve anything at all, beyond a general notoriety.

Azam Ahmed’s big article on tail-risk funds got a lot of play in the NYT yesterday, but I don’t know why — he gives us no evidence to believe that they’re large, important, or even growing particularly fast. There aren’t many hard numbers in the piece, but the ones he does supply seem small to me:

Products linked to an index known as the market’s “fear gauge” total nearly $2.5 billion. And in the last year, the amount of money managed in dedicated tail-risk accounts by the bond giant Pimco has doubled to $23 billion.

Boaz Weinstein, a former trader at Deutsche Bank who lost more than $1 billion of the bank’s money during the financial crisis, began raising money for his own Armageddon fund late last year. It has since grown to $400 million of mostly institutional money, part of the $3.3 billion he has raised for his hedge funds.

The only remotely significant number here is Pimco’s $23 billion in “dedicated tail-risk accounts” — but I’m a bit suspicious of that number, given that Ahmed claims it has doubled in the past year. If you go back to last year’s iteration of this article, from Bloomberg, it was pretty clear that the dedicated accounts hadn’t even launched yet:

The Pimco Tail Risk Hedging Fund 1 will be the first in a potential series of partnerships, according to a private placement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 23. The initial fund will be designed to protect investors from a drop of more than 15 percent in a benchmark index that Bhansali declined to identify.

So it looks as though Ahmed is including, here, funds which are designed to go up in value in good times and which simply incorporate a certain amount of tail-risk hedging — funds like the Pimco Global Multi-Asset Fund. That’s emphatically not a dedicated tail-risk account which offers costly insurance against extreme market events.

Ahmed’s article, then, insofar as it purports to be reporting actual news, rests mainly on very vague statements about how “investment professionals have a new pitch,” or what “clients are suddenly realizing,” or that “Wall Street lawyers say money manager clients have approached them in recent months about forming new funds aimed at providing protection.”

And as an analysis of tail-risk funds, it’s weak. There are pro forma to-be-sure grafs about how “protection does not come cheap and occasionally fails to work”, but there’s no indication that tail risk hedging is, conceptually speaking, pretty much impossible. Emanuel Derman gives one reason why: tail risk is not a simple and identifiable thing which can be insured against.

The value of a portfolio can be substantially destroyed by more than one cause. Portfolios can be ruined by equity crashes, credit spread widenings, bond defaults, high interest rates, sustained inflation, increases in volatility, illiquidity, etc. To protect your portfolio against so-called tail risk may require spending money on insurance against all these risks, and there is no panacea here.

David Merkel gives another: if you’re buying insurance, you need to be sure of your insurer’s ability to pay out in the event of a catastrophe. But in the markets, your insurer is precisely the sort of institution which is likely to be going bust as a result of some unexpected tail event. Writes Merkel:

In order for tail risk to be mitigated fairly, someone must keep a supply of slack high quality assets. Rather than the insurer doing that, why not have the investor do so? The insurer brings along his own cost structure. Why not self insure and bring down the risk level directly. Someone has to hold high-quality assets to mitigate risk; let the investor be that party; embracing simplicity and enjoying reduced risk without the possibility of counterparty failure.

This is pretty much the same conclusion I came to last year: the best way to hedge against tail risk is to put 90% of your assets in Treasury bills or other super-safe assets. This is not an extreme strategy at all; indeed, it makes perfect sense for anybody who’s both rich and conservative, including Suze Orman (“I have a million dollars in the stock market, because if I lose a million dollars, I don’t personally care.”)

The problem with tail-risk hedging is that everybody doing it wants to get healthy returns during good years and then have very little downside risk during bad years. It’s an impossible combination to achieve, and although Wall Street will happily sell tail-risk hedging products to those who want them, there’s absolutely zero evidence that they actually work in practice.

So if and when Universa comes out with a black swan ETF this month, my advice will be to stay well away. Indeed, insofar as it helps makes investors overconfident, on the grounds that they’re hedged, it’s likely to be positively dangerous — just as portfolio insurance was in 1987. Tail risk, it turns out, is just too amorphous to hedge. Sorry.

NYT reader on DSK: “Let it go to trial and let the jury decide who is more credible.” — NYT

GDP growth in African countries, 2002-11 — Bloomberg

Jim Ledbetter hears that Fortune is putting up a paywall this year — Reuters (see also)