The Bear’s Lair: The Old Economy Bubble
On Friday evening, the NASDAQ share index was down 59.3 percent from its peak, set on March 12, 2000. But in spite of all the economic gloom, the Dow Jones index over the same period was up 7.2 percent.
Year: 2001
The Bear’s Lair: Asleep till 2015?
The venture capital industry hit town Friday at a lunch meeting held by the ESI-Sloan Congressional Forum with a report on industry progress and an outline for those congressional staffers present of what regulation the industry would like (not much).
The Bear’s Lair: Close Down This Casino!
A Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation lunch meeting I attended last Wednesday (and to which I was attracted by its title “Who let the Bears Out”) on the subject of stock market deregulation was particularly interesting for one feature: All the panel speakers were in favor of it. During the meeting, the thought thus […]
The Bear’s Lair: Free money feeding frenzy
In fiscal year 2000, the federal government consumed about 18.2 percent of U.S. GDP, while state and local government consumed a further 11.5 percent, for a total of 29.7 percent. This is significantly lower than the level prevailing in 1975, and has therefore been a cause of much optimism about the economy. However, the long-term […]
The Bear’s Lair: alchemists of error
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers described the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, first propounded in 1961, as “the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory” in the Wall Street Journal after the 1987 stock market crash.
The Bear’s Lair: The productivity scam
The American people love to believe that the United States is unique. The Constitution is unique, not warmed-over John Locke. U.S. foreign policy is unique, not conventional big power self-interest. And above all, the real “shining city on a hill,” is the U.S. economy, which naturally has the fastest productivity growth in human history, greater […]
The business of playing God — Part 2
Read part 1 here From a business point of view, human genetic manipulation is more interesting than cloning, since there is likely to be a somewhat larger market for it.
The Bear’s Lair: Wrong again, Alan!
Alan Greenspan last week okayed a tax cut on the grounds that the surplus might otherwise become so big for so long that the government would be forced to buy up the U.S. stock market.
The business of playing God — Part 1
Recent scientific developments suggest that human cloning is now technically possible. Britain has just legalized it for very restricted research purposes, while in the United States a number of privately funded attempts to clone a human being are underway.
The Bear’s Lair: Real Estate – the other bubble!
I was in London last week. Investors and the political community there are in a smug mood. They accept that the United States is probably heading into a recession, but this is of little importance to them. Compared with the U.S. stock market, European stock markets appear modestly valued (their optimism here is also somewhat […]