Share the View: Jordan's Right to Negotiate

Share The View

THE LATEST OPINIONS FROM BLOOMBERG VIEW

JANUARY 30, 2015 bloombergview.com

MIDDLE EAST The Editors: "The vital principle of not paying ransom to terrorists is too often honored in the breach. Yet Jordan, as it considers a possible hostage-prisoner exchange with Islamic State, should ignore the U.S.'s insistence that the same principle applies, because plainly it doesn't." Read more... DECLASSIFIED Eli Lake: "With the recent battlefield success of the Kurdish forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, some of the people held captive by this jihadist army are now being released. This includes dozens, if not hundreds, of women who were pressed into a brutal kind of sexual slavery." Read more... Josh Rogin: "Congress is going to move forward with Iran sanctions legislation sooner rather than later, and there's nothing the Barack Obama administration can do to stop it. That's the word from one of the two authors of the bill that passed the Senate Banking Committee." Read more... COMPANIES Megan McArdle: "The McFamily is losing its McFather. After only two and a half years at the helm, McDonald's Chief Executive Officer Don Thompson is stepping down." Can Steve Easterbrook "chase the malaise out of McDonald's sales?" Read more... Justin Fox: "This is McDonald's conundrum. It is famous for its simple, low-rent fare, which may be selling well in middle-of-nowhere Grand Forks (seriously: look at a map) but is running into trouble with younger consumers elsewhere." Read more... POLITICS Francis Wilkinson: "If the Koch brothers bake a billion-dollar electoral cake, can they eat it too?" Read more... Jonathan Bernstein: There was lots of buzz yesterday about a Mike Allen story over at Politico on how Hillary Clinton "may be delaying the formal announcement of her candidacy. I'm not surprised at this, but it raises the question: What's the point of formal announcements anyway?"Read more... McArdle: "Last week, in her State of the Union response, Joni Ernst mentioned going to school with bread bags on her feet to protect her shoes. These sorts of remembrances of poor but honest childhoods used to be a staple among politicians." Read more... WALL STREET Matt Levine: "A sign of a good scam is that it's hard to tell who's being scammed. So here is a charming little story about International Capital Group, which agreed to pay $4.3 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges of penny-stock misbehavior." Read more... CARS Edward Niedermeyer: "This week's report that U.S. government surveillance efforts have reached our roads appears to be just the latest troubling expansion of post-Sept. 11 domestic spying." Read more... HEALTH-CARE REFORM Ramesh Ponnuru: "Millions of Americans could find their health-insurance plans endangered if the Supreme Court rules this summer that President Barack Obama's administration has broken the law in subsidizing them. ... Congressional Republicans nonetheless should step up and solve the problem -- and they should do it in a way that hastens the end of Obamacare." Read more... RUSSIA Leonid Bershidsky: "Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been extremely secretive about his two daughters, so much so that it's all but impossible to find their recent photos on the Internet. Now, however, the Kremlin seems to be doing little to stop a fast-spreading story that Putin's younger daughter Ekaterina lives in Moscow and heads a company that's involved in developing a $1.7 billion innovation center." Read more... REAL ESTATE Jonathan J. Miller: "During the past year, foreign buyers have accounted for about a third of all condo deals in Manhattan. It probably won't last." Read more... ECONOMICS Stephen L. Carter: "There is something of an economic mystery to how and why we tip." Read more... Noah Smith: Why is the public obsessed with economists? "It's because economists, like the shamans and oracles of yore, offer people the hope of understanding the mysterious titanic forces that shape our lives." Read more...