Amid great fanfare, the U.S. Senate last week finally passed the largest reorganization of the U.S. federal government since 1947, in which 38 different government agencies are to be combined in a Department of Homeland Security. Few think this will make much of a difference in practice — after all, the provision of “homeland security” […]

It is a curious comment on the inflexibility of the human mind that, after an era in which breaking up public sector monopolies has been enormously fashionable — with both political parties in the United States, in Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and even France — there still remain certain areas of the economy […]

It was all so easy in 1908. Herbert Asquith introduced the British Old Age Pension, at 5 shillings (25 pence) a week, in the 1908 Budget, and didn’t even have to raise taxes to pay for it. It helped of course that the pension was payable from age 70, at a time when British life […]

Much ink has been spilled on the future of the U.S.-European Union relationship after the electoral successes of the “isolationist” Republicans and the anti-Iraq intervention German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but developments elsewhere are increasingly raising the question: On a 20 year view, does Europe really matter any more?

The Federal Funds futures market at midday Monday indicated a certainty of a 0.25-percent Federal Funds rate cut at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting Wednesday, with a 15 percent chance of a 0.50 percent rate cut. The stock market seems to have greeted this likelihood with whoops of joy; one is forced to ask: […]