The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos in Russia, the ouster of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in Bolivia and the stiffing of international lenders by the Nestor Kirchner government in Argentina all demonstrate one thing. Far from having ended, history is rolling back the free market reforms of the 1990s, as the international […]

Like a vampire whose captors can’t find a silver stake, un-expensed stock options still wander among us, distorting earnings comparisons wherever they alight. The Financial Accounting Standards Board has now announced it won’t produce a definitive ruling on expensing stock options until the second half of 2004 — presumably after, not before November 2, 2004. […]

A new book “Bull!” by former Barron’s journalist Maggie Mahar (Harper Business, $27.95), gives the best account I’ve seen of the great bull market of 1982-1999, including all the things that went wrong. There are lessons for us all in it, not just for 2030 or thereafter, when the next bull cycle of that magnitude […]

The Cold War, against people trying to create an infinitely powerful, infinitely unresponsive world government, was supposed to have ended in 1991.