“The Awakening Conscience,” William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of 1848, shows the effect on a young girl of the dawning realization that she has “ruined her life” by allowing herself to be seduced by a smooth guy with a mauve velvet jacket. The picture could well be re-used in today’s U.S. economy, with Federal Reserve […]

Jim Rogers, famed Wall Street investor, thinks commodities are in a 10-15 year up-cycle. While Rogers is in certain respects cuckoo, he may be right on this one.

“I have seen the future, and it works” wrote Lincoln Steffens, fatuously, after his visit to the newly Soviet Russia. Today, if you want to see the future working you should look at Japan, which demographically and in terms of the business cycle is where we will be a decade from now.

For sheer chutzpah, Intel chief executive officer Craig Barrett’s Wednesday piece in the Wall Street Journal, explaining why he opposed expensing stock options, took some beating. The following day, it was revealed that Barrett himself doubled his allocation of stock options in 2003, presumably on the principle of “Get it while you can.”