The Congressional Budget Office last week released its long term budget forecast for the next 50 years, which showed that if nothing was done (and taxes automatically rose substantially from their present level through “bracket creep”) the Federal deficit would total 17 percent of gross domestic product by 2050, and Federal debt held by the […]

The performance over the last six months of the five existing Bear Food portfolios, stocks which I would expect to perform badly, has been outstanding. Unfortunately, it’s been outstandingly good — the average of all the portfolios is up 31.7 percent, compared with a rise of only 13.4 percent in the Standard and Poors 500 […]

Assuming the Russian reluctance to sign the Kyoto protocol on global warming holds, the treaty isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, whatever global warming was occurring is still occurring. What to do? A Cato Institute conference Friday discussed the problem, and produced some fairly clear answers.

“FDR’s folly” (Jim Powell, Crown Forum, $27.50) demonstrates, by use of economic rather than political analysis, that the majority of New Deal policies (and of president Herbert Hoover’s economic policies) were counterproductive, and prolonged the Great Depression. Yet neither president was stupid, or under-educated. So could such counterproductive policies be tried again, in a similarly […]

Monday I looked at president Herbert Hoover’s mistakes leading into the Great Depression, and asked whether they could be perpetrated again; today I look at the New Deal itself, and at which of its economic follies are liable to recur.

The U.S. economy of 1999 had only one serious imbalance — the stock market bubble. Today’s economy has not one but four imbalances; four “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” which may well cause war, famine, pestilence and death in the years to come. Really the only major uncertainty is: in which order?

A Ponzi scheme requires three things in order to be (temporarily) successful: a massive source of outside money, a sophisticated PR campaign, bloviating about its glories, and a “magic mushroom” to make people believe in it. U.S. monetary policy currently has all three.

As I discussed Monday in Part 1 of this column, the likely collapse in Miami of the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations will be at worst a blip, at best a benefit to the countries concerned — FTAA, as an idea, was misguided from the word “Go”. In this part 2, I consider […]

The collapse at Cancun of the Doha round of world trade talks was a major blow for world prosperity for the next decade. The likely collapse in Miami of the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations will be at worst a blip, at best a benefit — FTAA, as an idea, was misguided from […]

The 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination later this month is bringing the inevitable slew of retrospectives, either polishing the halo or belittling the achievements, according to taste. However, in the economic area, Kennedy’s greatest achievement was an anomalous one: he was the true father of the supply-side economic revolution.