links for 2011-04-22

The two countries reaffirmed their commitment to implement a free-trade agreement under negotiation since 2007, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said today in a speech in Tokyo. Gillard met yesterday with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and promised Japan steady supplies of liquefied natural gas and rare-earth metals.

On Jan. 8, 1835, all the big political names in Washington gathered to celebrate what President Andrew Jackson had just accomplished. A senator rose to make the big announcement: "Gentlemen … the national debt … is PAID."
That was the one time in U.S. history when the country was debt free. It lasted exactly one year.

Yesterday Standard & Poor’s noted that Apple’s iPhone might not sell well because it doesn’t have a keyboard. Wait, that’s not it. Instead, S&P briefly woke up to the U.S.’s fiscal imbalances and bravely warned that it wouldn’t change its rating now, but it might one day change its rating, which is to say it confirmed that it is a credit rating agency that, now and then, changes its ratings.