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Things are not so sweet for the sugar market. Prices have been tumbling and reached a six-year low on Monday on news that Brazil's cane growers are in for a bumper harvest. But while gold made the headlines, the dramatic fall in the sugar price was widely overlooked, despite closing down 4.4pc, compared with a 2.3pc slump in the price of bullion. Over the past year alone, sugar prices have fallen by a quarter. So why has everything turned sour? Bumper Harvest Monday's sharp price drop was driven by signs that Brazil, the world's biggest producer of sugar, is on...

Imagine if you will you were crafting the perfect presidential candidate. It's likely the following would not be on your list: two-time divorcee with multiple bankruptcies; bombastic reality television star who has appeared on professional wrestling shows; loud-mouth uncensored ego maniac with questionable hair. In other words, Donald Trump. But among the 2016 GOP presidential nominees, it's Trump that's taking the headlines. It's Trump who has people talking. And, most tellingly, it's Trump who is surging in the polls, with the latest numbers showing him with almost twice the support of his closest rival. Why? There a several reasons. First,...

She said it. She really did. Actually she typed it. But still, there was no hedge. In a live Facebook Q&A set up primarily for average people interested in asking Hillary Clinton questions, some reporters popped in too. Ok, a lot of reporters popped in, since Clinton hasn't exactly been too open about taking questions from reporters. Among the online attendees was the Post's own, Wesley Lowery. Lowery asked Clinton this question and got this response: "Black lives matter." With those three little words, Clinton acknowledged that there are myriad ways that race continues to shape life in America that...

It's been six years since the Great Recession technically ended. Since then, job numbers have come back up, and unemployment has gone back down. In April 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the number of US private sector jobs had finally returned to their pre-crash peak. But not all cities have recovered equally. "We know every city was hit hard," says Glassdoor's chief economist, Andrew Chamberlain, who's been looking at which areas are still struggling six years later, and which places are now booming. The short answer: Go West, young man. Of the top 10 cities on Glassdoor's...

A well-funded leftist community organizing group that works closely with unions brought a family of illegal immigrants to Iowa to harass GOP presidential candidate and Wisconsin Governor. Scott Walker(R-WI)on Sunday.A look at mainstream media reports on the incident, however, provides a stark lesson in how the country’s newsmakers twist,slant,and bury the real story of the tactics used on a daily basis by the organized network of pro-illegal immigration groups that are pushing for a radical agenda to erase America’s sovereignty.It began when Walker made a campaign stop in his Iowa hometown. Surrounded by the media horde of whirring cameras, Gov....

Tax policy is thought by many in Washington to be one of the more effective tools in the battle against inequality. Indeed, presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders have implied they would raise taxes on the rich to correct for rising inequality, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Hillary Clinton is set to announce her plans to increase taxes on capital gains this week. Populist calls for higher taxes on the rich play very well on the stump, but the resulting policies always seem to produce unintended consequences. Two provisions of Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increase are good examples: The...

In case you missed it, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is running for President of the United States. The former Milwaukee County Executive officially announced his candidacy last week at the Waukesha County Fairgrounds, leading his supporters to chant things like “Walker-shaw! Walker-shaw!” while enjoying the musical stylings of Rascal Flatts covering “Life Is A Highway.” You can relive the magic (complete with a blustery cameo from Sean Hannity!) by checking out our exclusive photo essay. Fun! Oh, and in case you missed this, a lot of people dislike Walker. Whether it’s because of his dismantling of unions, his dismantling of...

Rodney Johnson July 20, 2015There’s a village in Japan where the dead outnumber the living, and I don’t mean the ancestors in the cemetery. The bodies are dispersed around the small town of Nagoro. It’s a small community of some 35 people, most in their 60s or older. The place is so sparsely populated that the locals consider their 150-plus dead a part of their community. OK, so they aren’t literal dead bodies. Instead, the locals erected scarecrow-like figures in their likeness. Scarecrows fill the schoolhouse whose students long since graduated. They wait by an old bus stop, even though...

After spending decades as Wall Street darlings, arrogant business leaders are out of fashion. The new hotness for CEOs these days? Displaying humility, self-awareness and honesty. In this new world, a good leader doesn’t brag about his "TEN BILLION DOLLARS," as Donald Trump's campaign did last week. A good leader doesn’t rank his workers and fire the bottom 10 percent each year, as revered General Electric CEO Jack Welch did back in the day. The new CEOs project humility. They apologize when they screw up. They admit when they don’t know something, and they empathize with their workers and treat...

I’m asked every day if America is the next Greece or Detroit or Puerto Rico — and the answer is an unequivocal no. The U.S. economy — especially the private sector — is structurally very healthy. That wasn’t the case on the eve of the great financial meltdown of 2008 when American companies and households were leveraged up to their eyebrows. What’s different today from eight years ago is that now it’s the government that’s in the fiscal intensive care unit while companies and households have rebooted. The stunning improvement in business and family balance sheets is arguably the most...

At the beginning of my recent article, Will Wisconsin's Ignorance Become America's Ignorance Again? (Pravda.Ru, 03/04/2015), I stated, "Ever since America's politicized, corrupt, unethical, corporate-controlled Supreme Court decided the cases of Citizens United vs. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon vs. FEC (2014), I have written numerous articles for Pravda.Ru describing how these two decisions destroyed the ability of working class Americans to exercise their once fundamental right to freedom of speech and unleashed a torrent of unbridled political corruption that is rapidly replacing democracy with corporate fascism." As the machinations of Wisconsin governor, and newly announced presidential candidate, Scott Walker graphically...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker acknowledged in a CNN interview that in the past he had expressed support for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but said that he wasn't talking about amnesty at the time. In an interview aboard his campaign trailer that aired Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Dana Bash pressed Walker about his shift from somebody who once said a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants "made sense" to a presidential candidate talking about restrictions on legal immigration. She asked whether such shifts undermined his pitch to voters that he's somebody who stands up for...

YANJIAO, China — Every morning at 5:30, Liu Desheng joins a dozen retirees waiting for the express bus to Beijing from this small city in Hebei Province. They stand at the front of the line but never board, instead waiting as bus after bus pulls up, each picking up 50 people from the ever-lengthening line behind the retirees. Around 6:30, their adult children arrive. The line, now snaking down the street, has become an hourlong wait. People cut in, and a shoving match breaks out. But the retirees have saved their children this ordeal. When the next bus pulls up,...

During U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday regarding a new government initiative to bring high speed internet access to low-income groups, the topic of South Korea’s education system came up. “In South Korea they pay their teachers the way they pay their doctors,” he said in front of an audience at Durant High School in Durant, Okla. “They consider education to be at the highest wrung of the professions.” The reason it came up at all had to do with South Korea’s widespread high speed internet access especially in the city’s capital of Seoul. Obama voiced a similar statement...

There has been so much attention on Greece in recent weeks, but the truth is that Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb which threatens to explode at any moment. As you are about to see, there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That...

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is concluding his first week as a presidential candidate with a ten-county tour of Iowa. Walker held a town hall event in Cedar Rapids Friday afternoon and began with a prayer for the marines murdered in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Thursday. The governor said he learned one of the dead marines was from Wisconsin just before coming to town, and called radical Islamic terrorism a "virus" that is increasingly spreading into the U.S. He also mentioned his personal connection to Iowa, having lived in the state from 1970 to 1977, and said his...

Senator Jerry Moran discusses dangers of national debt, and entitlements and warns what's happening in Greece may foretell America's fate. When the Gov't teat runs dry, have a SHTF plan.

PHOENIX, Ariz. — There’s no love lost for any of the 2016 Republican presidential contenders at the 2015 Netroots Nation confab, but attendees reserve a special kind of loathing for one candidate in particular: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. It’s an understandable sentiment given the setting. This year’s edition of the annual convention of liberal activists is heavily focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, with a strong union presence. The AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association have booths set up near the center of the convention hall, and many of the other booths are focused on one...

President Reagan had a gift for proving his critics wrong. Almost none of the leading economists of the late 1970s thought that his supply-side tax-cutting agenda, along with stable monetary policy and deregulation, could revive the U.S. economy. But the prosperity of the 1980s, with growth rates higher than 6 percent, proved the Gipper correct. An economics major from Eureka College understood our free-market system better than the so-called experts at Harvard, Yale and MIT. As the 2016 presidential campaigns gear up, Reagan’s policies are under assault again, this time even from some on the right. This new group, called...

A line of people stretched outside Joey's Diner in Amherst Thursday morning ahead of Scott Walker's first New Hampshire campaign event in more than a month. Call it pent-up demand; call it curiosity; call it a candidate’s emerging base of support. Whatever it was, this much was true: the crowds waiting to see the Wisconsin governor were too big for the restaurant to hold. So the campaign staff improvised, backing up a red pickup truck to the front door. "Were going to try to fit as many people inside the diner, standing-room only, after he arrives," one staffer told the...