As legend has it, the song “Happy days are here again” became the theme tune of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 Presidential campaign, and then inspired the American people to regain their confidence and slough off the Great Depression.

The United States and Chile signed a free trade agreement Friday; a similar agreement was recently signed with Singapore. I therefore thought it worthwhile to look at the issue of bilateral versus multilateral free trade agreements and, more broadly, to what extent free trade is what it’s cracked up to be.

My four Bear Food portfolios, from January 2001, December 2001, and June and December 2002 had a bad six months from a Bear point of view, rising more than the market. The question must now be: Is their Bear Food value going to get any better in the next six months?

The euro was trading midday Tuesday above $1.19, higher than the level at its optimistic launch date of Jan. 1, 1999, and more than 30 percent above its nadir. Yet it can go much further — the deutsche mark was at 1.42 to $1 in December 1995, implying a euro value of about $1.37. So […]

In an April 28 column, “The productivity puzzle,” I examined the evidence for the much-touted “productivity miracle” since 1995 and found that the apparent (albeit limited) gains in labor productivity were misleading. This week, I return to the subject, and discuss what the implications of this non-miracle might be for business, government, the U.S. economy […]

During the late 1980s and 1990s, there was general agreement on the policies that emerging markets should implement in order to achieve economic growth, so much so that a term “Washington Consensus” emerged for it. There is no longer such a consensus, and citizens of many countries will suffer for its disappearance.

A country with a heavy natural resource base, a basic illiteracy rate of 15 percent, higher than the Latin American average, a GINI (inequality) coefficient of 0.59, equal to Brazil’s, and corruption equal to that of Belarus is unlikely to be a success story. Add in a race-based government motivated by retribution, and one of […]

U.S. multifactor productivity trends for 2001, for the private non-farm business sector, released with the minimum possible publicity April 8, show a drop in productivity of more than 1 percent in that year. Where then is the “productivity miracle” so beloved of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and others?

In the last 20 years, the term “risk management” has come into general use, reflecting a belief by financial sector managers that a business’s risks can be “managed” by appropriate mathematical techniques. Regrettably, the techniques are faulty, and reliance on them increases risk rather than managing it.

“The next big thing ain’t computers,” said Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison in a Wall Street Journal interview recently. Is he right? If so, what is the next Big Thing and when can we expect to see it?