Shocker. Our Free exchange chart last week (“Shocks and ores”, June 8th) was mislabelled. The price series ran from 1950 to 2012, not to 2011. Sorry.

THE television screens went blank late in the evening of June 11th. The transmission failure was no accident. The Greek government had peremptorily closed down ERT, the state broadcaster, branding it a “haven of waste”. All of its 2,700 employees are to be sacked. A new, leaner organisation will replace it.The move was abrupt and opposed by the two smaller parties in the coalition government. It came just as representatives of the troika—the IMF and European authorities administering Greece’s bail-out—arrived in Athens for another inspection of efforts to revive the economy and to shake up the public sector. The timing is unlikely to have been mere coincidence, the more so since there had been a serious setback to the privatisation programme earlier in the week.For months Gazprom, a Russian energy behemoth, had been expected to gobble up DEPA, a gas supplier that dominates the Greek market. But at the eleventh hour Gazprom withdrew its interest, leaving no bidder at all. Although there was one offer for DESFA, which operates the gas grid and is a subsidiary of DEPA, a big hole has opened up in this year’s planned privatisation receipts of €2.6 billion ($3.4 billion). The sale of DEPA had been expected to raise close to €1 billion.In fact the DEPAcle seems to have occurred partly for reasons beyond Greece’s control. European competition officials,...

WHEN India loosened its rules on how banks deal with bad debts in 2008, the financial crisis was raging. The aim, sensible enough, was to give breathing room to borrowers in temporary difficulty because of a shock that originated thousands of miles away in America’s housing market. Five years on, however, the policy has come back to haunt the country’s financial industry.Bank loans are usually classified as either performing or non-performing. If non-performing, lenders must build up reserves against potential losses. In 2008 the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the supervisor, permitted the widespread use of an intermediate category of “restructured” loans. The terms of these loans had been watered down to help the borrower but banks could assume any difficulties were a blip and avoid building up provisions.The spirit of that rule has been abused in the past five years as firms have rushed to get laxer terms in order to avoid admitting they are bust—ably assisted by their bankers. Consider India’s state-owned banks, which are responsible for three-quarters of all bank loans and where bad debts are overwhelmingly concentrated.

RHETORIC too often crowds out the facts in any discussion of immigration. Research published this week by the OECD, an inter-governmental think-tank, provides some valuable ballast.The research, which is published in the OECD’s latest “International Migration Outlook”, looks at the fiscal impact of immigrants (defined as the foreign-born) in 27 rich countries. The study draws on household-survey data to make detailed comparisons of immigrants and the native-born in terms of their net direct contribution to the public purse—the difference between what they pay in direct taxes and social-security contributions, and what they receive in benefits.The study casts light on one big worry—that immigrants are welfare junkies. In fact, their net direct contribution to the public purse is generally positive. The big exception is Germany, which has many foreign-born pensioners who came from Turkey as guest workers in the 1960s and from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.Although immigrants generally pay their way, their net direct contribution does tend to be smaller than that of the native-born. But this arises from their paying less tax rather than receiving more benefits. And the main reason for this shortfall in taxation is lower employment, especially among women. If host countries want to squeeze the most out of immigrants, the answer is to get more of them into work.The fiscal...

THE falls in global bond markets in May also reversed a long rally in southern European debt. Yields on ten-year Spanish government bonds rose by 30 basis points over the month. There may be worse to come. Investors remain nervous about how soon America’s central bank will slow its bond-buying programme. Adding to the worries, Germany’s constitutional court will hold public hearings on June 11th and 12th about the legality of policies undertaken by the European Central Bank (ECB), above all the initiative that stemmed the rout in peripheral euro-area debt last summer.

ALTHOUGH the names on the list are supposed to be secret AIG and Prudential, two insurers, this week confirmed they are on it. So too did GE Capital, the conglomerate’s financial arm. These firms, and perhaps others, have joined America’s largest banks and clearinghouses in being designated “systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs) by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a regulatory watchdog. What that means in practice is that because they are thought to be significant enough to blow up America’s economy, they should get special attention.An appeals process against being labelled a SIFI will last for 30 days, but discussions have been going on for years so it is hard to believe minds will be swayed now. The immediate consequence is that the firms will be regulated by the Fed and subjected to tougher capital and operational requirements. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, said the designations would “protect taxpayers, reduce risk in the financial system, and promote financial stability.”Others are less enthusiastic. “This is a catastrophe,” says Peter Wallison, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and a former White House counsel. Putting these institutions under the thumb of the Fed will inevitably undermine their ability to innovate, he argues. And joining the group of entities perceived to be too big to fail means they...

HUMANITY harbours a lingering fear that Thomas Malthus might just have been right. The dour reverend first warned in 1798 that population growth would lead to soaring resource prices, leaving workers destitute. Two centuries of growth later, the worry that the world’s natural resources are finite remains.Paul Ehrlich, a biologist of Malthusian disposition, argued in “The Population Bomb”, a 1968 book, that rising populations would inevitably exhaust those resources, sending prices soaring and condemning people to hunger. That pitted him against economists who argued that rising prices should mitigate the squeeze by calling forth more supply. In a famous 1980 wager Julian Simon, an economist, bet Mr Ehrlich that commodity prices would be lower a decade later. He won, as the effects of rising prices in the 1970s showed up in energy conservation and more oil exploration. But when exuberance returned to commodity markets in the 2000s, so did the old arguments. Jeremy Grantham, a money manager, wrote in 2011 that “price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives.”In a new...

THE euro-zone economy remains prostrate after suffering six consecutive quarters of declining output. The European Central Bank (ECB) is under pressure to act when its governing council meets on June 6th. One option would be to introduce negative interest rates.Such a decision would make the ECB the first big central bank to move into negative territory. But it would not be alone. Denmark, which does not belong to the euro zone but fixes the krone to the euro, went negative last July to fend off inflows of foreign funds that threatened to break the peg and lead to an unwelcome appreciation. If the ECB followed suit, the refinancing rate, which it charges for lending money to banks and which it lowered in early May from 0.75% to 0.5%, would remain positive. As in Denmark, the rate to turn negative would be the one paid to banks on their deposits at the central bank; this has been zero since last July (a decision that prompted the Danish move).