Free Republic

Bank of America's Transforming World Atlas has loads of lovely infographics in it, but one of the most colourful is a map of the world's riskiest sovereign debt.The map uses the prices of credit-default swaps, which are derivatives that pay out if a borrower defaults.Here's the map:BAML Sovereign credit-default swaps have been used as a type of insurance against sovereign governments not paying back the money they owe. As with any insurance product, the more expensive it is, the more likely the event you're insuring against will happen soon.

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler's new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up...

We’ve talked quite a bit in the past about the foreign oligarch demand-driven boom in Manhattan real estate prices and the dollar strength-induced bust in the market for luxury Miami condos. As the dollar continues to surge and signs emerge that the hot money laundering trade may be waning, here are some clues as to where the 0.002 percenters of the world can be found going forward. Mapping the number of people with $30 million or more in assets by city…...and the breakdown looks like this…More from Citylab:  Things have changed since the last edition of the report. Now London...

Yesterday I heard a quack health foods doc on the radio repeat something we hear a great deal, only he claimed to have a source for it, namely that the U.S. is down the list in life expectancy among developed nations. Supposedly this was a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association. I have some ideas as to why this may be (if indeed true) but I'd like some Freepers involved in medicine/insurance or other health-related fields to weigh in. What would account for the US having shorter life spans than, say, places such as Denmark or France?

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