White House Visitors: C.E.O.’s and StarsBy JEFF ZELENY A roster shows executives, labor leaders, lobbyists and a few celebrities were cleared into the White House for meetings or events. Among them: Jamie Dimon, Vikram Pandit, George Clooney and Lloyd Blankfein.  

   Greek crisis exposes cracks in Europe's foundation
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, May 7, 2010
It is easy to dismiss Thursday's 30-minute, 1,000-point boomerang on the Dow Jones industrial average as a freak event that resulted when everyday human error collided with high-speed, high-volume computerized trading. But it should not be forgotten that that the whole thing was triggered when traders around the world simultaneously pushed the "sell" button as they watched live video of baton-wielding riot police wading into a crowd gathered outside the parliament in Athens to protest the passage of austerity measures foisted upon their government by their European neighbors and creditors. Even after technical glitches were suspected and the trades were unwound, however, the markets and the world confronted the precarious state of the 60-year effort to create a single economy and a unified political system out of Europe's once-warring countries. The Dow has already fallen more than 600 points in three days on fears that a European debt and banking crisis could drag the continent's economy back into recession and put the entire European project in jeopardy. This project has created a massive new bureaucracy in Brussels, a much-ignored new political apparatus in Strasbourg and a central bank in Frankfurt that continues to reflect the Germanic fear of easy money. After the Berlin Wall fell, the once-communist countries to the east were gradually incorporated into the union. And under the financial umbrella of the euro, the smaller, poorer countries at the periphery found they could borrow and attract enough capital to bootstrap themselves into the ranks of wealthy nations. But as C. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute put it this week, the fundamental problem is that even with a single currency and a unified political and bureaucratic structure, the arrangement is only a "halfway house" on the way to genuine political and economic integration, and a rickety one at that. While capital and goods and tourists can move relatively freely across borders, workers and services cannot, and national governments continue to jealously protect their regulatory and fiscal prerogatives. Although the political and economic elites continue to swear allegiance to the European project, their top-down strategy continues to meet strong resistance from voters. It was only a few years ago that, with the United States moving from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor and Europe enjoying a boost from the rapid growth of its new members in the east, many were predicting the euro would soon rival the dollar as the world's reserve currency. But nobody was saying that Thursday as the euro continued its months-long slide from $1.50 in January to $1.26 at Thursday's close. There is little doubt that Greece's debt crisis is of its own making, the result of corruption and tax avoidance and that seductive Mediterranean coupling of high living and low productivity. Greece now finds itself in a trap where the only way it can refinance its crushing debt load is to drastically cut spending and raise taxes, but…

  Ron Paul, the GOP’s Unlikely Savior   "No one thinks Ron Paul is going to lead the GOP, let alone be president. He's 74 years old and just too…cout there. He is an obscure guy who waited patiently (if not quietly) for the cycle of history to come back around his way, and finally it did. We have been arguing about money, credit, and banks since the first days of the republic. Paul is a bargain-basement Jefferson for our time."  

  Lakers assistants are interested in coaching position at USC   Email Picture
 Lakers assistants Brian Shaw and Jim Cleamons are trying to win an NBA championship with one eye on the Trojans' job that opened when Tim Floyd announced his resignation Tuesday.  

 Apple: A love affair turned sourApple's gadgets are adored by millions of people. But for Gilbert Adair the magic is gone Read Article