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: […]

The Efficient Market Hypothesis, first expounded in 1965 in a paper by Eugene Fama, is the capstone of modern finance theory, that has been responsible for three Nobel prizes in Economics (Modigliani, 1985, Markowitz/Miller/Sharpe, 1990, Merton/Scholes, 1997), although curiously enough not one for Fama himself.

“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington” caroled Noel Coward in the famous 1936 hit. With the current troubles in the financial services industry, there is another career that a loving mother should best avoid for her offspring: banking.

It was a period of youth and excess, when 20-somethings became billionaires, dress became casual, profits became unnecessary and accounting principles became infinitely flexible. It has ended, and a very different world is taking its place.

Residents of suburban Virginia, like me, are being bombarded with propaganda to vote in favor on Nov. 5 of one of the most indefensible referendum objectives I have ever seen: to pay an additional 0.5 percent sales tax to build new roads and transit projects in the region.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings last weekend, as recession scours the world economy, were dominated by an overwhelming but largely unasked question: does the “Washington Consensus” work?

At some point, the question must arise: was the explosion in size of the financial services business in 1982-2000 real, or was it yet another figment of an overheated market’s imagination?

I n the Macedonian elections held Sunday, about 60 percent of the ethnic Macedonians voted for the former Communist SDSM, while between 60 percent and 70 percent of the Albanian minority voted for the (questionably former) Albanian terrorist leader Ali Ahmeti.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have caused large changes in U.S. and world politics, and may yet involve the United States in a major war, but their economic effect has been minor.

With the Germany’s IFO Business Activity Index close to its all time low, with the country’s tax cut due next year now postponed, and with the lowest economic growth rate in the EU, it is fair to ask of Germany: where did the wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) go, and what can be done to bring it […]