It’s been a while now since I wrote this article on how Greece’s fertility bust and our unenlightened response to it helped build our mountain of debt in the ’80s and set us on course for the sovereign debt crisis of 2009. I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue of fertility lately, and I don’t like the economics of it. Especially the combination of debt rising exponentially and a population no longer on the increase.

This is how I came across the near-mystery of the Greek fertility rate. You’d never guess it, but Greece’s fertility actually rate grew as we entered the recession in 2008 and continued to rise until 2011, when the last data were collected, and it remained higher than at any point during the ’90s. You can see the data for yourselves here. Fertility rose to levels unseen since 1987—an apparent reversal of a decades-long slowdown in fertility also experienced by most other European countries.

But look more closely (or perhaps, zoom out a little) and you’ll find that the reversal really started in 2000, and is reflected elsewhere in Europe. Eurostat explains it thus:

The slight increase in the total fertility rate observed in recent years may, in part, be attributed to a catching-up process following a general pattern of postponing the decision to have children. When women give birth later in life, the total fertility rate tends to decrease at first, before a subsequent recovery.

In particular, zooming in on women’s fertility rates by age group in Greece, it becomes obvious that what really happened since the naughties was that the persistent fall in fertility among women in their 20s paused briefly, while fertility rates among women in their 30s and 40s continued to rise. Both of these groups are now roughly as fertile as they were in the 1960s, thought for different reasons. Essentially, the long trend of Greek (and other European) women delaying their first births is slowly grinding to a halt, and we’re seeing the demographic equivalent of a dead cat bounce. The effects of the crisis, however, are also observable. Every age group has seen a dip in fertility since 2010, and they are likely to continue to do so.

One thing that’s interesting in studying demographics is to see how fertility rose and fell in different regions. Greece’s true demographic black hole is Western Macedonia, which managed to lose fertility even in the boom-times, and was among the worst-hit regions during the crisis. Unemployment there is the highest in Greece, at just over 30%, and most worryingly it is a border region, situated between Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. As more of our national politics turns to exploiting nationalism, this region is going to become a testing ground for all manner of extremist tactics.

On the other hand, Attica, Crete and the South Aegean did fairly well in terms of fertility, and unsurprisingly the islands in question had the lowest unemployment rates in all of Greece as of late 2011, which would explain some of their fertility performance (Attica of course boasts a mega-city, which tends to distort trends).

Stand by then, for the next chapter: the inevitable discussion about the link between unemployment and fertility.

A version of this originally appeared on Emmanuel Schizas’s blog. It has been republished with permission. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Nearly 40 retail companies that order from garment factories in the country have signed a six-page agreement to do precisely that. Last month, more than 1,000 workers died when a building housing several garment manufacturers collapsed.

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (pdf) lays out a new factory inspection program and calls for companies that sign to underwrite any renovations needed to bring their suppliers up to established safety standards. Here is a visual explanation of the accord:

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Over the past two months, McDonald’s has axed beloved items from its menu like the Angus Third Pounder and its fruit and walnut salads. And there may be more to come, according to a Bloomberg report, that says some McDonald’s franchisees got an email in October that identified other items for possible culling.

A McDonald’s spokeswomen, Danya Proud, declined to comment or confirm whether the report was true. “We have been adding and removing menu items from our menu for years. It’s part of doing business and nothing new,” she told Quartz.

But the world’s largest restaurant chain might want to rethink its revolving door menu of fast food inventions that are retired almost as soon as they are introduced. (This list includes the McJordan burger, created in Michael Jordan’s heyday, onion nuggets, McPizza, and salad served in cups.) Last October, McDonald’s global same-store sales fell for the first time in nine years, largely because of slowdown at its American locations. That trend continued this year as the chain’s US sales declined 1.2% during the first quarter. As is McDonald’s strategy, it has responded by offering new menu items.

But there’s reason to believe that less is becoming more in the world of fast food. In a survey done by the Nation’s Restaurant News and WD Partners, respondents ranked menu variety as the sixth most important trait (pdf), out of 10 at limited-service restaurants, after food quality, cleanliness, and service.

McDonald’s soon-to-be-defunct Angus burger was seen as the chain’s answer to semi-service, but slightly more premium burger chains like Five Guys, which has been capturing US diners downgrading from full-service restaurants since the financial crisis. A better approach for McDonald’s may have been emulating Five Guys minimalist menu instead.

The Five Guys menu also includes over a dozen burger toppings. fiveguys.com

Other chains doing well with simplified menus include the burrito chain Chipotle, which offers five main food items. In-N-Out Burger offers just four main course items, not including customized options on its so-called secret menu. In contrast, McDonald’s sells a total of 145 items, according to Datassential, which researches menus. That selection includes over a dozen desserts, more than 10 types of salads, and almost 60 burgers, sandwiches and wraps, according to the US McDonald’s website. Spoilt for choice might not always be what the customer wants.

Corporate America loves the US’s shale gas boom—but when it comes to exporting the stuff, companies are divided. Fossil-fuel producers like ExxonMobil are all in favor of building liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals so they can sell the gas to more markets, but manufacturers (such as chemical giants) that have started building factories in the US again fear that exports will squeeze the domestic supply and make gas more expensive for them. And environmentalists also tend to oppose exports, since they oppose an expansion of fossil fuel production in general.

Today the export crowd scored a victory. The US Department of Energy (DOE) gave Freeport LNG approval to export natural gas to countries that do not maintain free-trade agreements (FTAs) with the US. (US policy favors exports to its free-trade partners; gas exports to non-free trade countries need separate permission.)

Freeport is only the second company to get this sort of permit. Its facility on Quintana Island, on the Texas coast just south of Houston, had obtained approval in 2011 to export LNG to the 17 countries that have signed FTAs with the United States. That same year, DOE approved non-FTA exports from the Sabine Pass LNG Terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, but since then new permits had been on hold because of lobbying from opponents.

In today’s decision, DOE approved the export of 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day for 20 years from an expansion of Freeport’s existing LNG terminal. The department relied on two studies that found that while exporting LNG could raise natural gas costs in the US somewhat, the international market would keep prices in check, because, the decision reads, “importers will not purchase US exports if US wellhead price rises above the cost of competing supplies.” No doubt it was also swayed by Freeport’s argument that LNG would create as many as 21,000 jobs and pump as much as $5.2 billion a year into the economy between 2015 and 2040.

Not surprise then that shale gas producers such as ExxonMobil supported Freeport’s bid while the American Public Gas Association, a trade group of gas distribution companies, opposed it. Dow Chemical too urged DOE not to approve the LNG exports, arguing it would raise manufacturing costs, and the environmentalist Sierra Club also weighed in. “Exporting LNG will lead to more drilling— and more drilling means more fracking, more air and water pollution, and more climate fueled weather disasters,” Deb Nardone, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas campaign, said in a statement.

I checked, and re-checked, and triple-checked, and I can confirm that it’s not 1979 anymore.

Now, that shouldn’t be too surprising—I’m not writing this on an Apple II, after all—but it is to a generation of men (and yes, they are all men) who think stagflation is always and everywhere a looming phenomenon. No matter how low inflation goes, they see portents of Weimar. But that neverending 70s show isn’t just a phobia of rising prices. It’s the idea that the solution to economic pain is more pain. In other words, Volcker-worship.

Stagflation wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Economists had thought there was a stable relationship between higher unemployment and lower inflation—the Phillips Curve—that broke down in the 1970s: prices rose, but so did joblessness. It broke down because people started to expect more inflation the more inflation there was. This cycle of ever-rising prices got going with too loose monetary policy, and continued with the oil shocks. The former started when Richard Nixon pressured Fed Chair Arthur Burns into lowering rates in the runup to the 1972 election, and the latter turned commodity inflation into wage inflation due to widespread cost-of-living-adjustment contracts. It wasn’t until Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to run the Fed in 1979 that things began to turn around. After unsuccessfully trying to target the money supply, Volcker decided to jack up interest rates, and keep them there, until inflation came down. It worked.

But whipping inflation didn’t exactly make Volcker popular in the short run. It took what was at the time the deepest recession of the postwar period to bring down people’s inflation expectations. Out-of-work homebuilders sent two-by-fours they no longer needed to the Federal Reserve; farmers barricaded it with their tractors. In other words, it was the paragon of what Very Serious People think about when they think about “leadership”: inflicting pain today for a better tomorrow. It just so happened that in this case, it was the right thing to do.

It’s not now.

Our present problem isn’t too little inflation-fighting, but too much. Indeed, headline prices rose just 1.1 percent in April, while unemployment is still a depressing 7.5 percent. But it’s not just the unemployment; it’s the long-term unemployment. Millions have been out of work for six months or longer, at which point companies won’t even look at your resume. The only bit of good news is this is an easy problem to solve: with interest rates as low as they’ll ever be, the government can borrow money and put people back to work. It’s really that simple.

Except for people who don’t want it to be that simple. People like Michael Kinsley. He’s the not-so-rare austerian who’s suspicious of stimulus because it seems like the easy wrong instead of the hard right. Here’s what he said about it in The New Republic:

I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be.

This gets things completely backwards. The longer we put off austerity, the lower the price will be, since fewer of the long-term unemployed will become unemployable. And besides, there’s no reason we shouldn’t produce as much as we can now just because we made mistakes before. As Keynes said, the resources of nature and men’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they were — or, as John McCain might put it, the fundamentals of the economy are strong. It’s up to us to make those fundamentals work with the right ideas.

But this doesn’t make for an exciting narrative. A failure of ideas is much less dramatic than a failure of Leadership™. Where’s the sacrifice? The hard-headed vision? That’s what Kinsley pined for back in 2010, when he lobbed this puzzling complaint about the stimulus:

But this cure has been one ice-cream sundae after another. It can’t be that easy, can it? The puritan in me says that there has to be some pain. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been plenty of economic pain. But that pain has come from the recession itself, not the cure.

In other words: Give me Volcker, not Keynes. Give me penance, not prosperity. Give me hard choices, not easy ways out. But most of all, give me what worked in the past.

That would all be fine if it were still 1979. It’s not. The facts have changed. It’s time for inflationistas to change their minds.

Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.

This originally appeared on The Atlantic. Also on our sister site:

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Any time a single company is responsible for nearly 10% of a country’s GDP, it’s a problem. Thanks to a lack of competition, Pemex, the Mexican oil company responsible for producing all of the country’s oil, has seen production fall steadily over the past decade.

It’s a monopoly, man

Since Pemex was nationalized 75 years ago, it has enjoyed complete reign over Mexico’s oil production. According to the Mexican constitution, Pemex has exclusive rights to: explore, exploit, refine and process crude oil and natural gas; produce basic petrochemicals and liquid petroleum gas; and carry out firsthand sales of such hydrocarbon products. Could it really be a coincidence that two of Mexico’s slowest growing sectors—oil and electricity—are also its least competitive?

Mexico’s oil production has fallen every year since 2009. As comparatively inefficient as Pemex looks in the chart below, it’s even more inefficient today. Pemex’s oil production hit an eight-year low in 2012.

Down go production, and profits

Crude oil production has been falling in Mexico since 2004, led by tumbling output from Pemex’s largest oil field Cantarell, which is located offshore in the Bay of Campeche. As three of the company’s four main subsidiaries have made large financial losses, falling profits and productivity have followed, and are forcing the company to rely on more external borrowing to finance its investments. The company hasn’t turned a profit since 2006.

Patching up an oil dependency problem

What’s worse is the Mexican government’s unhealthy dependence on oil revenues: Pemex provides the government with roughly 40% of its budget. Opening up the oil market to private competition could mean slicing off a chunk of Mexico’s fiscal revenues.

Still, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff, especially if Pemex emerges leaner and healthier after being exposed to a bit of competition. The OECD acknowledged the same in its most recent economic survey of Mexico. “A more competitive environment for Pemex would generate adequate market incentives to improve its efficiency.”

What remains to be seen is whether president Enrique Peña Nieto is up to the task.

Earlier this year, his Institutional Revolutionary Party agreed to “end its opposition to constitutional changes that would ease state-owned Pemex’s grip on the oil industry.” It’s a promising start to solving Mexico’s imminent oil crisis. But there’s still no bill on the table that proposes a break-up of Mexico’s state-owned oil-monopoly.

Nieto doesn’t appear to be all that committed to solving his country’s oil problem. He later back-tracked on his supposed plans to privatize Pemex, saying the company “will neither be sold, nor will it be privatized, and calling it a “symbol of progress and national identity.”

Identity, perhaps. But progress? Please.

European shareholders want to help pry Spanish oil firm Repsol from the jaws of the Argentine government. Repsol is suing the Argentine government for seizing 51% of YPF, the Argentine oil company formerly owned by Repsol. The company is also suing Chevron and other multinationals firms, which have since penned deals with YPF to develop the country’s rich shale resources. European shareholder organizations spent this week lobbying US investors in Repsol as well as the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the World Bank.

The lawsuits could take months or years to resolve, but the shareholders hope to shame the Argentine government into paying $10.5 billion for Repsol’s claim to the 51% stake in YPF. The shareholders also want to add their legal opinion to some of Repsol’s suits.

But chances are, Argentina wouldn’t obey a ruling in Repsol’s favor. The Argentine government has held out on $20 billion in legal fines for other cases over contract termination, bond defaults and other alleged violations.

“Argentina needs to attract foreign investors, not turn them off,” said Henning Wegener, director general of the Spanish Association of Minority Shareholders for Listed Companies, one of the shareholder groups helping Repsol. “Resolving the Repsol case would be a way to show the world that it welcomes foreign investors.”

Argentina also has bigger fish to fry, argues Wegener—namely a currency crisis and a decade-long fight with bondholders over its $100 billion default in 2001. In the meantime, the government will be busy gobbling up private assets to pay the bills.

Mark your calendars: After tomorrow (May 18), the US Treasury can’t borrow any more money to fund already-authorized spending until Congress increases the debt limit. And you may remember that when the US runs out of cash, we end up on a very complicated and worrisome path, one that could end in a global financial meltdown.

It’s the kind of situation that has Treasury secretary Jack Lew telling people he will begin the Orwellian task of “implementing the standard set of extraordinary measures.” Why are these measures extraordinary? Because they’re meant to ward off insolvency—mostly by suspending payments to pension funds and other deferrable bills to keep as much cash on hand as possible, as long as possible. Why are they standard? Because they’ve been used four times in the last four years.

The real deadline for raising the debt limit comes when those extraordinary measures run out. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which maintains a model of the government balance sheet, that date is likely to come in October 2013.

So what’s keeping Congress from raising the debt ceiling? House Republicans, who don’t want any more debt on the public balance sheet unless they get the cuts to taxes and welfare spending they want. But the latest news from the green eye-shade guys in Washington is that the deficit is falling faster than it did after World War II—almost worryingly fast—and debt, after climbing just a little bit more, is set to stabilize over the next decade:

That has taken some of the juice out of the Republicans’ usual threat, namely that they will force a default unless the Democrats agree to plans to reduce the debt. Instead, Republicans have turned this into a debate about the goal of tax reform. Both sides agree, broadly speaking, that tax reform should close tax loopholes. But Democrats want to use the savings from doing so to lower overall tax rates and cut the deficit; Republicans simply want lower rates. And it’s still not clear if exchanging tax reform for lifting the debt ceiling will satisfy conservative Republicans, who would rather see dramatic spending cuts attached to any increase in borrowing.

But that’s just talk for now, since President Obama has said once again that he won’t negotiate about raising the debt ceiling. That policy sort-of worked in February, when Congress passed the debt ceiling suspension that expires tomorrow, with only the condition that both chambers of the US legislature pass a budget. Now, Republicans are refusing to begin negotiations on that budget. Another summer of fiscal politics looms, with a proper October surprise at the end.

Moody’s Ratings agency upgraded Turkey’s long-term credit rating to Baa3 for the first time today, giving the country an investment-grade rating at two out of the three major credit ratings agencies. In a post-financial crisis world, Turkey has leveraged an important geopolitical position with competitiveness, prudent fiscal policy, and economic reforms, even as more advanced economies struggle to grow.

Turkey hasn’t missed out on benefiting from the global “search for yield.” With the safest assets yielding a pittance, investors have flooded into places like Turkish government bonds which are considered more risky. That’s driven the yield on those bonds—the price Turkey’s government has to pay to borrow for a certain number of years—down more than three percentage points over the last year.

But the country hasn’t used the promise of easy financing to expand its debt burden; to the contrary, in fact. Since 2009, the country has slashed its public debt from 46.09% of GDP to 36.06% of GDP. It’s also reduced the share of its debt denominated in foreign currencies (which means it won’t be forced to pay back debts in potentially more expensive currencies) from 46.3% in 2003 to 27.4% in 2012. Nor have companies gone crazy issuing debt they may not be able to pay back; total outstanding corporate debt is at about the same level it was five years ago ($217 billion).

Turkey exports the highest number of goods to Germany—an economy that’s remained relatively resilient despite crisis elsewhere in the euro area. Its second-biggest export market is Iraq, with which it has been developing close economic ties.

But even beyond that, Turkey has become a crucial economic bridge between the West and the East, cultivating strong trade relationships with Middle Eastern and North African neighbors.

With seemingly sustainable growth, low public debt, strong regional partnerships, and tame inflation, then why is Turkey only now becoming an investment-grade prospect? Moody’s warns that external vulnerabilities—susceptibility to economic and geopolitical shocks from Europe or the Middle East—still have the capacity to jolt Turkey’s economic success.

Located at the hotbed of two continents and numerous geopolitical conflicts, it’s unlikely that these kind of threats will subside anytime soon. Even so, today’s Moody’s upgrade is an important achievement; with a credit rating equal to Spain’s, Turkey has arrived on the global economic playing field.

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For a long time, hedge funds roped themselves to Apple and rode its remarkable rise higher. It was almost like they had to own it. The stock had such a large weight in stock market indexes, the so-called smart money risked severe under-performance by opting not to own the electronics giant. But as Apple’s shares have stalled, so has hedge fund enthusiasm for them.

The stock has been a terrible under-performer this year, down more than 18%, even as the broader S&P 500 stock market index is having something like a career year, rising nearly 16% so far. Meanwhile, Google’s up roughly 28% year-to-date, with shares recently hopping to more than $900.

One of the funds lightening up on Apple and loading up on Google belongs to speculator par excellence George Soros, who remains very much alive, and has had a pretty nice run lately. Besides getting on board the Google train, Soros’ fund reportedly made a killing shorting the Australian dollar as well as the Japanese yen and lightened up on gold holdings ahead of the yellow metal’s plunge.

The IPO for data visualization firm Tableau Software today lived up to the hype that has preceded it. Tableau opened trading at $47, compared to its IPO price of $31—and that’s even after the size of the offering was increased. Interestingly, Tableau chose the New York Stock Exchange over Nasdaq for its IPO. Nasdaq has been traditionally seen as the go to place for tech IPOs, but NYSE has managed to gain share from its rival over the last few years.

NYSE started to make inroads in tech IPOs after the listing rules changed in 2008 to make it easier for companies that were losing money, which is a characteristic of a lot of tech start ups, to go public. Since then, NYSE has increased its presence in Silicon Valley and markets heavily to tech startups. It has managed to win over LinkedIn, online review company Yelp and network security firm Palo Alto Networks for their buzzy IPOs.

According to NYSE figures, the exchange had 80% of the top 20 tech listings last year and has eight of 13 so far this year. Nasdaq claims each of the New York exchanges have eight tech IPOs so far in 2013. The figures differ because the exchanges have different definitions for what is a tech company. Today, Nasdaq celebrated the listing of cloud-based marketing software firm Marketo, which priced its IPO at $13 a share and opened at $20.

Nasdaq was chosen for some of the most well known companies to go public, such as Groupon, Zynga and Facebook, the biggest IPO prize last year. NYSE also competed fiercely for those IPOs, including Facebook. But its loss may have been a blessing in disguise. Nasdaq experienced technological glitches that affected trading for Facebook’s stock on its first day as a public company.

Nasdaq’s technology, in addition to lower fees and its presence in Times Square, is part of its pitch to companies. NYSE markets its big media presence (the open and close are broadcast on CNBC) and its combination of human intelligence and technology (it still has a trading floor.)

Nasdaq has also snagged some companies that in the past were seen as traditionally more NYSE-type companies. Mondelez International, the snacks business spun off from Kraft, chose to list on Nasdaq and so did doughnut maker Dunkin’ Brands Group. Nasdaq also notes that even after the Facebook snafu, 14 companies switched from listing on NYSE to Nasdaq last year, including Kraft Foods, while 11 firms went from Nasdaq to NYSE.

In the tech world, among the next targets for wooing by NYSE and Nasdaq are online data storage companies Dropbox and Box, China’s Alibaba, and of course, Twitter, which probably won’t IPO until next year.