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 →

President Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has caused anguished squawking about the loss of Fed independence. Yet experience since 1998 has shown that Bank of England independence has produced worse outcomes than before, and the world’s independent central banks’ overall performance has been thoroughly third-rate. Central bank independence without firm policy guidelines is an invitation to crazed professors like Ben Bernanke to invent new monetary policies that bear no relation to reality. Political control is essential, allowing voters at least some say in central bank decisions; a Gold Standard or equivalent discipline would work even better. Continue reading →

President Trump’s decision to take a 10% share stake in Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) as part of the deal for the Biden administration’s excessive handouts to a failing company was arguably a good one. However, the original CHIPS Act was economically damaging while suggestions by NEC Chairman Kevin Hassett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that there might be more such purchases were economically dangerous. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, government has proved a lousy investor, a poor industrial decisionmaker and a menace to innovation as regulator. The barriers against such activity in free-market economic theory should generally be bolstered, not ignored. Continue reading →

It is a long-standing view of the Left, for which there is a depressingly large amount of evidence, that the tide of History heads in only one direction — towards an authoritarian socialism that might as well be Communism. Less than three years ago I believed that in Latin America at least, authoritarian socialism had gone so far that it could well entrench itself with a kind of Comecon trading autarky. However, the triumph in Argentina and last week’s Bolivian Presidential election, in which the candidate of the ruling Socialists won only 3% of the vote, have made me reconsider: Is it possible, can it be the case, that in Latin America at least, History’s inexorable tide might begin to flow backwards? Continue reading →

When looking at industrialization in Austria-Hungary, I was struck by how little its governments used the superb “Austrian School” cadre of economists its universities were then producing – surely results could have been better than the sluggish bureaucratized industrialization the country actually achieved. Yet other societies, notably 18th and early 19th Century Britain, used their available economic skills much better, while in later years modern societies have damaged themselves by relying on the wrong economists (Maynard Keynes and Thomas Piketty being the obvious examples), or have sent better ones to the Gulag (Nikolai Kondratiev). There must be a structural way of doing better! Continue reading →

President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer attracted much criticism, as government statistical agencies are claimed to be impartial. Such claims of impartiality should always be regarded with deep suspicion, as they generally conceal a noxious political agenda. When you look at the BLS’s statistical methods, its agenda becomes apparent. Ever since the Boskin Commission report of 1996, the BLS has reported consumer prices using “hedonic pricing,” a highly opaque methodology that biases reported inflation sharply downwards. That falsification inflates reported growth and living standards, thereby giving us a falsely optimistic view of economic reality. Ms. McEntarfer may be blameless individually, but the BLS and its sister agency the Bureau of Economic Analysis have for decades needed to be taken apart and rebuilt using sound economic principles. Continue reading →

President Donald Trump’s tariff agreements with the EU, Japan and other countries have changed the economics of world trade; they have also revolutionized global politics. Far from the “New World Order” trumpeted by such Marxist-globalists as Klaus Schwab, late of the World Economic Forum, we are now returning to a much healthier late-19th century existence, of multiple major powers competing, with few central organizations and the occasional political/economic genius of an Otto von Bismarck (1815-98). This Old World Order promises to increase human happiness a great deal more than Schwab’s failed Great Reset. Continue reading →

In Japan’s recent Upper House elections, the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition under Shigeru Ishiba lost its majority (barely) but a more striking result was the success of the populist-right Sanseito party, which won 14 new seats in the Upper House. Like its German cousin AfD, Sanseito proposes a sensible mix of policies including strong opposition to foreign immigration and Chinese tourism. Ishiba must not repeat Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s gross error of allying with the Socialists to keep out AfD; the opposite alternative, embracing Sanseito, will produce better policy and much better long-term results for Japan. Continue reading →

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2008, it was not a scam but a very ingenious, potentially useful new invention, largely because of the “blockchain” by which transactions could be recorded in permanent form. When I spent six months in late 2017 recommending crypto-currencies for an investment service (very successfully, being fortunate indeed in my timing), the market was largely dominated by retail investors throughout the world and it was still possible to separate scams from cryptocurrencies that were legitimately used to launch new digital products. Alas, since that time financial institutions have entered the market, recently with the encouragement of President Donald Trump and his administration. As we cynics might have expected, as governments and institutional investors have entered the market, its scam percentage has got far worse. Continue reading →

Wall Street trading titan Jane Street was last week banned from trading in India, having made a $5.2 billion profit from options trading apparently mostly at the expense of Indian retail investors, according to a Financial Times report. Jane Street, a trading house with $20.5 billion of net trading revenues in 2024, is an extreme example of the “financialization” that has overtaken the global economy since the 1980s. Just as globalization produced pathologies and is now being reversed, so too has financialization; it needs to be put back in its box. Continue reading →