The Federal Reserve at its October 28-29 meeting announced that it would stop reducing the size of its balance sheet and instead begin a renewed “quantitative easing” buying bonds from the market. In other words, the central bank will once again finance the government’s budget deficit, a flagrant violation of Monetary Policy 101. As I will show below, this will have immensely damaging long-term economic effects, further agglomerating and bureaucratizing the corporate sector. It will also allow the central bank to “Liz Truss” the government, forcing a market meltdown, every time the government tries to implement better policies. President Trump needs to find new Fed leadership that will reverse this nonsense. Continue reading →

The lengthy government shutdown of October-November 2025 suggests that the U.S. constitutional structure is faulty – no sensible system could possibly be designed for such frequent failure. Yet in its early decades, both before and after the dark cloud of slavery was forcibly removed, the system worked quite well – children were brought up on the speeches of the “Famous Five” most eminent Senators selected in 1957, the last two of whom, Robert LaFollette (1855-1925, Senator, 1906-25) and Robert Taft (1889-1953, Senator, 1939-53), served well into the twentieth century. The system went wrong somewhere. When you look carefully, it becomes obvious that one brief period of multiple “reforms” was responsible: the early 1970s. Continue reading →

This week, the Bear’s Lair column celebrates its Silver Jubilee. The first column appeared mid-afternoon on Election Day 2000, predicting a massive market slump (this is a Bearish column, after all!) and an electoral wipeout in 2004 for the then unknown winner of the 2000 presidential election. The full 25 years of columns can now be viewed in the Archive section of TBWNS.com and it has to be said, there are a lot of very wild misses in the predictions category! Conversely, every now and then, this column says something that nobody else says for a couple of decades, which then becomes conventional wisdom. The weekly puzzle for readers is to figure which column falls into which category! Continue reading →

The news recently that the 1,400-foot pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue is facing severe structural issues because the architect used the wrong kind of concrete causes one to question yet again the joys of big city living. Apartments in that building go for $30 million or so, for which you could buy a very nice Georgian country house in one of England’s more fashionable counties or a late-Victorian gothic palace in New York’s Hudson Valley. With the Islamic Marxist Zohran Mamdani about to become Mayor of New York and expropriate you, why the hell would you stay there? Continue reading →

Gold’s rapid price rise through $4,000 illustrates the collapse of conventional fiat currencies. Rather than look at gold’s rise, you should consider the dollar’s fall, with $1,000 dropping from 1 ounce of gold as recently as 2016 to 0.24 ounces today. Other fiat currencies have behaved similarly to that 76% decline over the last decade. President Biden’s freezing of Russian dollar reserves in 2022 also showed the dollar to be politically vulnerable as an international trading unit. There is thus a strong chance that all fiat currencies will shortly go the way of the Continental, the Assignat and the paper mark of 1923. Continue reading →

Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned it. The result by 1700 was a China that, however rich, was open to conquest by the West. The parallels with today’s Europe are clear, and the result for Europe may be similar. Continue reading →

Free trade economists are very fond of quoting David Ricardo’s (1772-1823) principle of Comparative Advantage, first expounded in his “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” in 1817. Ricardo was one of our greatest economists, but his principle of Comparative Advantage, like much of modern mathematical economics, rested on shaky assumptions and thus had flaws even when it was first propounded (as Ricardo himself admitted). Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage still gives its proponents status among economists and think tanks, but today, like most luxury beliefs, it immiserates ordinary people. Continue reading →

President Trump’s announcement last week that the fee for H1B visa applicants would rise to $100,000 should be welcomed. The much-abused and abusive temporary worker H1B, H2A, and H2B visa programs, greatly expanded by the late unlamented President George H.W. Bush, have been artificially wrecking the living standards of ordinary Americans for decades. This is not an accident; the programs are gifts to powerful corporatist lobbies who wish to subsidize their profits through massive inflows of cheap foreign labor. This is just the most egregious of the anti-market subsidies that have held back the U.S. economy and living standards for nearly a century and must be abolished. Continue reading →

The collapse of Tricolor, a $1bn subprime private credit lender making loans to those without Social Security numbers, is a rather small canary in a very large coal mine: the $3 trillion private credit industry. That industry has been fueled by “funny money” credit availability and represents a poisoning of the existing global credit system, seeking to increase yield by making loans of yet lower credit quality. It is the blackest impending hole in a world economy that has a lot of black holes and is heading for an inevitable debt deflation. Continue reading →

President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is no title that goes with it and it dies with the recipient, leaving nothing to his heirs. It would be much better to reverse one of the cardinal errors of the Founding Fathers and institute a hereditary peerage, an honors system that would be perpetual, flowing to the recipients’ descendants when there were any. The potential economic and social benefits of such a system are considerable. Continue reading →