For Some Taxi Drivers, a Different Kind of Traffic

Marc Lacey:

The tour guide’s voice dropped to a whisper as he pointed out the left side of his open-air taxi and said conspiratorially: “See that house? It belongs to Chapo.”


At the spot, where Mr. Félix’s brother Ramo?n was killed in 2002, in an infamous murder.



The State Department warns tourists about the drug wars.
The guide recovered his normal tone around the corner, well out of earshot of anyone who might be inside what he claimed was one of the beachfront hideaways of Mexico’s most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who is known universally by the nickname El Chapo, or Shorty.


Although Mazatlán markets itself as a seaside paradise in which the roughest things one might encounter are ocean swells, it is a beach resort with a dark side — one that many enterprising taxi drivers are exploiting with unauthorized “narco-tours.”



Mexicans are fed up with their country’s unprecedented level of bloodshed as rival drug cartels clash with the authorities and among themselves. But the outrage is tinged by a fascination with the colorful lives of the outlaws.

I visited Mazatlan many years ago, during college.

The banking crisis as a foreign policy issue

Tyler Cowen:

Here is some simple background:

If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.

No one wants to say it, but essentially the Fed has been bailing out European banks.


The inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall plan has been estimated at about $115 billion in current dollars. If we end up spending $250 billion on AIG, how much of that sum will go to European financial institutions and might it someday exceed the scope of the Marshall plan? (I do not, by the way, think that central banks ought to treat foreign creditors differently.)

More from the Economist.