News from Germany:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives have sealed a coalition deal with the Free Democrats (FDP) based on major tax cut plans.

The deal between the CDU/CSU and the pro-business FDP paves the way for the coalition to take office next week.

Income taxes will be slashed by 24bn euros ($36bn, £22bn) starting in 2011, according to the coalition agreement.

The parties agreed to unite after the September general election in which the FDP achieved its best-ever result.

News from America:

We are entering the billionaire bailout society.

For the past thirty years we have minted billionaires, and we have created the most unequal distribution of wealth since 1928-29. This didn't happen by accident. We deliberately deregulated the financial sector and we deliberately eliminated the steep progressive taxes on the super-rich that had kept in check our income distribution.

By unleashing capital and finance we were supposed to get an enormous investment boom in real goods and services. Instead we got a fantasy finance boom as Wall Street marketed derivatives to those with excess capital.

We also got the biggest crash since the Great Depression.

Perhaps the most dramatic measure of our emerging billionaire bailout society is seen by comparing compensation for the top 100 CEOs and to that of average workers (the 100 million or so non-supervisory production workers). In 1970 the ratio was 45 to 1. By 2006 it was 1,723 to one.

For those who do not know what neoliberalism, an explanation from my favorite economist Ha-Joon Chang: