What Does a Dollar of Debt Get You?

This weekend I am in La Jolla at good friend Rob Arnott's conference. Princeton Professor Burton Malkiel, of Random Walk fame, will be one of the luminaries at the annual Research Affiliates Advisory Panel. So, with that thought in mind, this week we take a seemingly random walk through the data to see if we can discern a trend. How much debt does it take to grow GDP? You probably missed it, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics gives us data that contradicts the recent labor numbers. Why is consumer sentiment so moribund? And that recession I predicted for 2007? I have a few thoughts on that as well. It should make for an interesting letter with a lot of great charts and graphs.

But first, let's deal with something far more serious than the economy, and that is the terrible situation in Darfur, where government sanctioned violence and murder is literally meaning that hundreds of thousands are starving to death.

The conflict in Darfur, a region of Sudan located in the north eastern part of Africa, has been rising for the past 3 years. It is estimated that 450,000 civilians, (men, women and children) have been killed and approximately 2 million people who fled the fighting are now displaced, homeless, starving, and still being persecuted. Many are living in refugee camps but as the violence escalates and the camps are being attacked, aid workers are being evacuated leaving the people of Darfur with no where to go.... and NO hope of survival.

The international community acknowledges the desperate nature of the situation. The United Nations Security Council has passed resolutions to send a UN peacekeeping force to supplement the ill-equipped and under funded 7,000 troops African Union peacekeepers. However, the Sudanese government sees UN troops as foreign invaders. Aside from NGO's (non government organizations) Darfur has received little help from the international community, because politics has become an insurmountable obstacle.

I often write about…