The drumbeat of legal actions and investigations against the corporate icons of the late ’90s intensified today, with the news that the New York district attorney was investigating Hewlett-Packard over its activities during the Compaq merger — or non-merger, as time and the lawyers will tell. This raises the questions: were dress down Fridays symptomatic […]

Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department dismissed a proposal made by the International Monetary Fund’s Anne Krueger that countries should be able to be declared bankrupt. This bickering emphasized yet again the current helplessness of the West in the face of “failed states” and the economic disasters that they cause, and raised the question: is […]

Monday, April 1, the day when people traditionally make fools of themselves, I took a crack at looking at the macroeconomic shape of the world in 2025. Tuesday, perhaps even more rashly, I look at the microeconomic makeup of that world.

April 1 being the day when people traditionally make fools of themselves, I thought I’d take a crack at what the world might look like after the new century is a quarter gone, say December 31, 2025 — this being about as far ahead as one can meaningfully speculate. Given the overall theme of these […]

William Hogarth’s 1747 classic “The Industrious Apprentice and the Idle Apprentice” may be about to demonstrate its continued pedagogical strength in the international economy, where Japan and the United States have enjoyed contrasting fates for a decade.

In this two part analysis, I ask a question that may have serious implications for the U.S. economy: are there now some service industries that are parasitic on the U.S. economy, so that their output should be subtracted from rather than added to gross domestic product figures? In the first part, published Monday, I examined […]

The potential bankruptcy of Arthur Andersen LLP, largely through litigation risks, brings into focus an interesting question: Are there some service industries that, far from contributing to the nation’s economy, in fact are parasites, so that their output should be subtracted from rather than added to gross domestic product figures?

The economic news in the last several weeks has been almost uniformly positive. The commentary from our competitors has been even more so, tending to dismiss as laughable the possibility that the recovery may be only temporary, that a “double dip” recession may occur. Consequently one is driven to ask: Are we in a bear […]

Corporate governance — the establishment of appropriate norms for the way corporations are governed, including independent directors and audit committees — is fashionable right now, both in emerging markets, where it is a major push of aid-sponsored economic “reform” and in the United States, where we are told that a better audit committee could have […]

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has led a charmed life since his accession to power May 1, 1997. He won re-election last year easily, has presided over an economy that, while it slowed in 2001, still posted the best performance in the G7 top world economies, and, by being an unexpectedly staunch U.S. ally, has […]