In this period of “exceptional uncertainty” (to quote Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), where can investors turn for a considered perspective on the current environment? Produced to feed the beast of the 24-hour news cycle, the bulk of financial journalism and commentary today isn’t worth the servers it is stored on. One notable exception to that rule is Buttonwood, the financial markets column of The Economist. Philip Coggan is the columnist — arguably the most influential position in financial journalism (along with the head of Lex at the Financial Times).

Deciphering the headlines
With the developed world facing fiscal and monetary crises, Coggan’s new book, Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order, is a veritable enigma machine for investors who wish to decipher today’s headlines (the U.S. edition was released Monday). In an email interview last week, Coggan shared his observations on some of the most pressing topics of the day. In the first of two articles, he explains why the current international monetary system is on its last legs and discusses the possibility of the Chinese renminbi replacing the dollar in a successor system:

“The thesis of the book is that economic history is a battle between creditors and debtors, with the nature of money the territory over which they fight. Money has two core functions; as a means of exchange (paying for your daily Starbucks) and as a store of value (making sure you can still afford a Starbucks in old age). Historically, those two functions have been in conflict; some groups have wanted to expand the supply to encourage economic activity; others have wanted to restrict the supply of money to protect the value of savings. Broadly speaking, the money expanders have been debtors and the money restricters have been creditors.”

Debtors and creditors: a historical struggle
As he makes clear, that dichotomy is at the root of the rise — and fall — of different monetary systems:

“Over history, creditors have tended to impose systems that control the supply of money — the gold standard, the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the euro — that prevent borrowers from repaying their debts in debased currencies. The strain of keeping up this discipline is intense in democracies where more people are debtors. The gold standard broke down in the 1930s, Bretton Woods in the 1970s and the euro is struggling today, as is what might be called the post-Bretton Woods system of independent central banks and inflation targets. A new world order will emerge from the ashes.”

Today, the struggle between debtor and creditor pits the United States — the world’s largest debtor nation — against rising superpower China. With more than $15 trillion in outstanding public debt, Uncle Sam is in hock to China to the tune of a cool $1.1 trillion. In light of these numbers and China’s growing confidence, it’s not hard to imagine that the relationship between the two nations will be instrumental in shaping a new monetary order. How fast will it emerge and how far will it go? Could we witness the renminbi (China’s currency) replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency? I asked Buttonwood.

A long way behind
“Could we see the renminbi replace the US as the reserve currency in our lifetime? It depends on how long you think you will live. Reserve currency status is not just a matter of having the largest economy; it is a function of liquidity and trust in the legal system. In both cases, the renminbi is a long way behind. Remember that sterling was still being used as a reserve currency in the 1950s, 60 years after the US overtook Britain.”

Nevertheless, the future stability of the dollar is at risk, as projected increases in unfunded liabilities related to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid threaten to upend a delicate equilibrium that is based on trust and confidence. That problem — serious as it is — is compounded by a fractious political class that is unable (or unwilling) to address the problem in a mature manner. Since optimism is a trait of the American character, let’s take a “glass half-full” approach. What are the reasons to believe that the U.S. can tackle its debt problem effectively? I asked Buttonwood.

Three hopeful signs
“The most hopeful signs for the US in dealing with its debt problems are threefold; demography, economic vitality and energy. America has a higher birth rate than Europe and (at the moment) benefits from lots of immigration. Whereas in Italy there are currently 3 people of working age for every pensioner, in the US there are 4.6. By 2050, there will be only 1.5 Italian workers per pensioner but the US will have 2.6, better than much of Europe today. Secondly, the US is in the forefront of new industries like software, biotechnology and alternative energy that could boost productivity in the future. Since economic growth is a function of a) worker numbers and b) productivity, both are positive news. Third, the recent development of shale gas makes the US much more energy sufficient than Europe.”

The old continent: No question about it, Europe is in a real jam right now. In our concluding article, Buttonwood lays out one way in which the European sovereign debt crisis may play out and discusses whether a new gold standard would make a good replacement to the current regime of floating fiat currencies. Finally, he highlights the extraordinary shift by which orthodox thinking in the U.S. regarding the currency has been turned on its head — stay tuned.

China may overtake the U.S., but three American companies are set to dominate the world.

This post originally appeared at The Motley Fool. 

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Negotiations on new reforms are going long into the night in Greece.

Remember, what’s happening now is not the negotiations with creditors — that’s secondary — but the intragovernmental negotiations: Leaders have to agree on more reforms (cuts, really) in order to get more bailout money.

They’re really pushing it to the wire, but they’re close.

Ekathimerini reports:

The leaders of Greece’s coalition parties came close to achieving an agreement over the terms of a new bailout for the country early on Thursday but objections over pension cuts prevented the deal from being clinched.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos called representatives of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund – known as the troika – back to his office at the Maximos Mansion at about 1 a.m. in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Reports said that the two sides would have to find a way to make 300 million euros of savings in order to avoid 15 percent cuts to supplementary pensions and another 15 percent to basic pensions for former employees at public enterprises.

They want to have a deal before tomorrow’s Eurogroup meeting. If it really is just down to 300 million euros in savings, there should be a way to pull it off.

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Asian markets are down slightly early in the trading session.

Japan’s Nikkei is up 0.4%.

Korea’s Kospi is down 0.6%.

Australia’s S&P/ASX is down 0.4%.

The seemingly never ending Greek debt negotiations continue.  Late in the U.S. trading session, Bloomberg reportedly obtained a draft of the troika’s terms.  U.S. stocks ended only modestly positive on Wednesday.

U.S. futures are down modestly, with Dow futures down 27 points.

SEE ALSO: 6 TOP ECONOMISTS ANSWER: Is China Heading Toward A Hard Landing?

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Google’s $12.5 billion deal to buy Motorola will be cleared as early as next week.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. Department of Justice plans to approve the deal next week.

European regulators have also set a deadline of next Monday to decide whether or not to sign off.

The authorities are worried that Google might use Motorola’s massive patent hoard to block other companies in the mobile space. Earlier today, Google tried to calm those fears by promising it would offer to license those patents before suing.

Once the deal closes, the fun begins: seeing whether Google can actually turn Motorola’s fading business around.

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This post originally appeared at Live Science

Teen pregnancies reached their lowest level in the United States in nearly 40 years in 2008, a nonprofit institute said in a report released today (Feb. 8). The research showed that teenage birth and abortion rates were also down, although disparities persisted in the statistics for black, white and Hispanic teens.

Sociologists Kathryn Kost and Stanley Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute reached their conclusions by pooling and analyzing data from their institute, the National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program. The Guttmacher Institute is a nonprofit organization that seeks to advance reproductive health and protect abortion rights.

“The recent declines in teen pregnancy rates are great news,” Kost said in a statement. “However, the continued inequities among racial and ethnic minorities are cause for concern. It is time to redouble our efforts to ensure that all teens have access to the information and contraceptive servicesthey need to prevent unwanted pregnancies.” [7 Surprising Facts About the Pill]

A study published this month in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine suggests sex education may need to be tailored to the region where it is taught, since sex-ed classes are less effective in conservative states.

Pregnancy, birth and abortion rates decline

According to the report, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate reached its peak in 1990: About 117 of every 1,000 girls between 15 and 19 years of age became pregnant that year. Since then, the teen pregnancy rate has steadily decreased. In 2008, the most recent year with accuate statistics available, the rate was about 68 per 1,000 teens, a 42 percent decline from 1990.

For girls younger than 15, the pregnancy rate fell 62 percent, from 17.5 to 6.6 per 1,000 teens, over the same time span.

The teenage birth and abortion rates also declined over the past two decades. There were 40.2 births per 1,000 teens in 2008, 35 percent lower than the peak rate of 61.8 in 1991. In 2008, the teenage abortion rate reached its lowest point since abortion was legalized in 1973: The rate was 17.8 abortions per 1,000 women.

Although the teen pregnancy rate dropped by 37 percent among Latinas and 48 percent among black Americans since the early 1990s, the rates among black and Hispanic teens remained two to three times as high as that of non-Hispanic white teens, the report said.

The researchers also found vast differences in birth and abortion rates across racial and ethnic groups. In 2008, the birth rates for black and Hispanic teenagers and the abortion rate for Hispanic teenagers were twice that of the rates for non-Hispanic whites. More strikingly, the abortion rate for black teenagers in 2008 was four times the rate for non-Hispanic whites that year.

Better choices

Preliminary data from the CDC suggests that in both 2009 and 2010, the birth rates among teenagers and young adult women were at historic lows. Information is not yet available on the abortion trends over the last few years.

The researchers pointed out that recent studies have solely credited increased contraceptive use to the 1995-2002 decline in the pregnancy rate for 18- and 19-year-olds. For girls ages 15 to 17, 75 percent of the decline was found due to increased contraceptive use, while the other 25 percent was from reduced sexual activity.

Though it appeared today’s teens are making the right decisions to prevent unintended pregnancies, that behavior is not guaranteed to continue, the researchers noted.

“Trends in teenage pregnancy, birth and abortion will need to be closely monitored over the coming years to determine how the reproductive behaviors of young women in the United States may be changing,” the researchers wrote in their report, which is available on the Guttmacher Institute website. “Further research will be needed to understand the factors that are affecting these trends.”

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This post originally appeared at Bleacher Report. 

The New York Giants capped off another exciting victory over the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, winning 21-17.

Though it may seem premature, the talk begins of the Giants becoming a dynasty.

With two Super Bowl wins in four years, Eli Manning has twice led New York to victories over the NFL‘s most respected franchise of the past decade.

Where do the Giants stack up against the current NFL dynasties?

Here are my rankings of the best dynasties in NFL history.

See them at Bleacher Report >

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The Earth has been covered by giant combinations of continents, called supercontinents, many times in its past, and it will be again one day in the distant future.

The next predicted supercontinent, dubbed Amasia, may form when the Americas and Asia both drift northward to merge, closing off the Arctic Ocean, researchers suggest.

Supercontinents are giant landmasses made up of more than one continental core. The best-known supercontinent, Pangaea, was once the world’s only continent — it was on it that the dinosaurs arose — and was the progenitor of today’s continents.

Conventional models of how supercontinents evolve suggest they form on top of the previous supercontinent, known as introversion, or on the opposite side of the world from that supercontinent, known as extroversion. Under these models Amasia would therefore either form where Pangaea once was, with the Americas meeting with Asia to close off the Atlantic Ocean, or form on the other side of the planet from where Pangaea was, with the Americas merging with Asia to close off the Pacific Ocean.

Now, geologists suggest that Amasia might emerge sideways from where Pangaea once existed, in what is now the Arctic, a process known as orthoversion. Moreover, this new model seems consistent with models of how past supercontinents formed, said researcher Ross Mitchell, a geologist at Yale University.

Which way did it form?

The introversion model, on the one hand, assumes that the oceanic plate between continents that formed when a supercontinent pulled apart has stopped spreading. As such, there is nothing to keep the continents from drifting back together and forming another supercontinent. The extroversion model, on the other hand, proposes that the oceanic plate that formed when a supercontinent pulled apart would keep spreading. The continents then drift away from it, meeting up on the other side of the planet to merge.

The new orthoversion model from Mitchell and his colleagues bases its motion of continents on where the edges of past supercontinents were. For instance, when Pangaea broke up, its rim dove or subducted downward into the earth. This subduction zone, which encircles the Pacific Ocean, is known as the Ring of Fire, and is where many of the largest earthquakes and volcanic eruptions now take place.

The orthoversion model proposes that the subduction zone surrounding a one-time supercontinent drives where its former components end up going. This suggests that modern continents will slide either north or south around the Ring of Fire. Since the Caribbean Sea between North and South America and the Arctic Ocean between the Americas and Asia appear transient in nature, the researchers suggest the Americas and Asia will go north instead of south, meeting at the Arctic to form Amasia.

To see which model of the supercontinent cycle might be right, the researchers tried to see which best matched data on how past supercontinents formed. These included Pangaea, as well as Rodinia, which existed between 750 million and 1.1 billion years ago, and Nuna, which existed between 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion years ago.

Rock records

To see how the components of supercontinents moved, scientists analyzed the impact that Earth’s magnetic field has on ancient rocks. Magnetic minerals in molten rock can act like compasses, aligning with the planet’s magnetic field lines, an orientation that gets frozen in place once the rock solidifies. Since these lines generally run north-south, looking at the way these minerals point can shed light on how the landmasses they are a part of might have drifted in space over time.

The researchers found that Pangaea apparently formed at nearly a 90-degree angle from the direction along which Rodinia fragmented — that is, Pangaea formed neither where Rodinia once was nor on the opposite side of the planet, but somewhere nearly exactly between those spots. Rodinia seemingly emerged in a similar manner from Nuna. Both findings support orthoversion as the explanation for how supercontinents form and fragment.

“Now that we have a clear picture of what the supercontinent cycle actually looks like, we can begin to answer the questions of why the supercontinent cycle operates as it does,” Mitchell told OurAmazingPlanet. “Why a supercontinent breaks apart remains an unanswered question.”

When to expect Amasia

These findings could also help scientists better understand the history of life on this planet, by figuring out where landmasses were and how organisms might have dispersed.

“Continents with similar fossil records likely share an evolutionary ancestry, but actually establishing a land bridge by juxtaposing those continents is finding the smoking gun,” Mitchell said.

As to when Amasia might form, that is “difficult to answer, because the supercontinent cycle is not as regular as the seasonal cycle, for example,” Mitchell said. “But we can get a clue from Earth’s history — the cycle is speeding up, such that the recurrence interval between successive supercontinents has become less and less. Knowing that Pangea formed 300 million years ago, we can predict a range of Amasia ages from 50 to 200 million years from now.”

The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

This post originally appeared at Our Amazing Planet.

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The parking lot at a ski resort is often filled with Jeeps, Subarus, and other highly capable, all-weather machinery.

But the mild weather the Northeast has seen this winter has kept many drivers from putting their toys away for the year.

Our friend Travis Moore spotted this Porsche 911 at Windham Mountain in New York just last month. The car is a Carrera S or Carrera 4S, we just are not 100 percent sure which since the model designation is covered up.

If any eagle eyed readers can definitively tell, please feel free to tell us what exact model it is in the comments.

This is also the first 911 we have ever seen with a roofbox on top. This has to be one of the best ways to hit slopes and then be able to enjoy a spirited drive home…unless you have a Ferrari FF.

Have you spotted a rare or unusual car/plane/train/boat/industry person in your travels? Did you take a photo? Do you like sharing?

If you answered yes to these questions, please send the picture to tokulski@businessinsider.com along with where you spotted it to be considered for our Photo of the Day.

Now take a peek at yesterday’s Photo of the Day >

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Today everyone was talking about Louis Vuitton condoms on Twitter.

If you’re willing to spend $68 for a twelve pack, you might be disappointed, as they are not actually associated with the company but have been designed by Irakli Kiziria for Design Provocation, according to a piece by Ileana Llorens of Huffington Post. 

This is not the only brand name condom rumor to make it online. A year ago, Coco Chanel condoms were reportedly sold at $279 a dozen. 

Those wanting to “stay classy,” as the Coco Chanel wrapping advised, still can do so with condoms from Proper Attire. According to Luxist, Proper Attire condoms have been designed by the likes of Alexander Wang and Charlotte Ronson. And probably the most affordable brand name condoms are those by Marc Jacobs, which only cost $1.50 a pop. 

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Germany has reached a deal with Kazakhstan that will see the European giant allowed to mine for rare earth and other minerals in the country in exchange for technological help and investment, the New York Times reports.

Angela Merkel and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev made the agreement — containing over 50 separate contracts worth a total of €3 billion ($4 billion) — in Germany on Wednesday.

Activists have been angered, however, as it appears the agreement makes no mention of human rights. Just days ago Human Rights Watch published an article calling on Merkel to make “human rights” a key part of the talks.

Certainly, if the footage coming out of the country at the end of last year is anything to go by, Nazarbayev has some way to go in that area. Amateur video footage showed police shooting and killing unarmed protestors, while the Kazakhstan government reportedly shut down mobile networks and internet connections to end strikes over worker pay.

Merkel has stood by the agreement, Reuters reports, telling reporters “German foreign policy is always value-based, and so when discussing economic interests we also talk about human rights, the adherence to democratic principles.”

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