Chicago Daily Observer

In his final warning before hiking interest rates last week, European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean Claude Trichet said, “If we are not resolute, there is a risk that inflation will explode.” With this he lifted the overnight lending rate to 4.25%.

We are not sure of the exact numerical definition of “exploding inflation,” but the ECB is clearly worried that 3.7% growth in the European CPI over the past year is fueled by more than just energy and food.

This leads us to ask a rhetorical question: where does inflation come from? Sometimes an answer can be found at the extreme and today’s extreme on the inflation front is Zimbabwe, where prices are doubling every month.

So why is this happening? Is it due to rising commodity prices? Or, rising wages? No. Zimbabwe is experiencing hyperinflation because the government is printing money to meet its payroll. They ... Read More...

Whether your name is Barack Obama, David Mamet, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey or whatever, you are a Chicagoan—or from Chicago—and it marks you.

For better or worse, political candidates, entertainers and people in the public eye especially bear the mark of their neighborhood, suburb, city or state.

So do we all!

But how Chicago?

What is this metropolis of ours and what brand does it leave on people’s hearts and minds?

And why?

Is Chicago:
A. A city of rampant crime, political corruption and go-to-hell sin?
B. An over-populated and sprawling inland metropolis with an inferiority complex about its reputation and limitations?
C. A deeply original and creative American city that has disdained many of the blandishments of an East Coast culture that was borrowed from and is imitative of the upper classes of Europe?

Each person anywhere who holds to any one of these viewpoints feels ... Read More...

Hundreds of government-subsidized apartments in Sen. Barack Obama’s former Illinois state Senate district that were built or rehabilitated by a half dozen of his close political friends and donors are now in such bad condition they will have to be demolished, The Boston Globe reports. This raises a big question for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: Is this the kind of change he plans to bring to the White House?

Obama co-authored an Illinois law that created $26 million in tax credits for local developers to join local authorities in public-private partnerships designed to rescue Chicago’s famously bad public housing. As a U.S. senator, Obama has also called for massively increased federal housing subsidies.