Stock prices remain well below the peaks of 2000, yet top management compensation keeps rising. Since the overall economy’s performance since 2000 has been at best mediocre, it’s worth asking what fuels this inexorable climb.

“Gentlemen prefer bonds” responded Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon when asked his opinion of investing in the 1920s stock market bubble. Well not today they don’t, if they’ve got any sense.

May import prices for the United States, announced Thursday, were up 1.6 percent over April. While that’s a freak number caused by the oil price spike, the overall truth remains: the inflation monster, asleep twenty years, is stirring back into life. The consequences of its revival will be dire.

With oil prices touching $42 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, many economic commentators have gone into denial, pointing out the many reasons why they can be expected to relapse again to the $30-35 range. Yet there is an alternative scenario, in which supply disruption causes oil prices to rise much further, and […]