Edwin Truman, former head of the International Finance Division of the Fed, spoke at the Institute for International Economics Thursday about the need for inflation targeting in monetary policy. However, it wouldn’t have worked in the late 90s, because published inflation figures ignore asset prices. Maybe the real problem of monetary policy is the lack […]

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.

Conventionally, there are thought to be two routes to escaping from economic depression: pumping up the money supply and boosting public spending. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and the Fed have now carried both about as far as they will go, and last week’s economic statistics suggest the U.S. may still not have escaped depression’s clutches. […]

If not rapidly reversed, the World Trade Organisation talks’ collapse at Cancun last Sunday has long term effects far more significant than the short term ones. It could cause immense difficulties for the open, fast growing economies of Asia (“tigers”) while greatly alleviating the pressure for reform in the sluggish polities of continental Europe (“weasels.”)

The collapse of the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, treated with little attention by Wall Street and most of the media, has ominous overtones for the world economy, that make a rerun of the 1930s much more likely. Just as President Hoover ushered in the Great Depression by signing the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff in […]

It was Ross Perot who predicted a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs heading southwards if Congress ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Sophisticated economists derided him. Well, listen up, guys — since the economy peaked in 2000, and more particularly in 2003, there has indeed been a “giant sucking sound” of […]

Iraq is now said to require tens of billions of dollars to restore it to economic health, beyond what is available from its slowly recovering oil exports. This figure is hugely in excess of aid budgets for much poorer countries in Africa, or for poorer, more populous countries such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka in […]