Anthony Trollope’s 1875 masterpiece “The way we live now” is an astonishingly accurate early portrayal of the peak of a speculative bubble “the Melmotte era.” It missed in only one respect: the Melmotte Era lasted only nine weeks. Our own generation’s speculative “Melmotte Era” has lasted almost a decade, but it is in the process […]

The claim by hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies that their pricing reflects the free market is pure fiction. The alternative touted by their opponents, of transferring the whole business to the government, would undoubtedly make matters worse. So what’s a poor free market economist to believe?

The leading environmentalist Lester Brown, at the New America Foundation Thursday, provided a new take on our environmental dangers that’s worth careful consideration for one reason: uniquely from an environmentalist in my experience, the short term danger is more salient than the long term one.

Speculation has begun on the successor to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, due to leave office when his 14 year term as Federal Reserve Board member ends in January 2006. Whoever his successor, he won’t have Greenspan’s enormous credibility with the markets, so monetary policy will never be the same. This is probably a good […]

According to economist David Ricardo, if the public sector deficit increases sharply, private saving can be expected to increase commensurately, thus ensuring that the capital is supplied to fund the deficit. Since total U.S. saving in 2003, public, corporate and private, was a mere 2 percent of gross domestic product, this doesn’t seem to have […]

Everybody appears to agree that the federal budget deficit, in this fiscal year approaching $500 billion, is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but not yet an urgent one. After November’s election, of course, the urgency of the problem will become fully apparent. It’s therefore with asking, with considerable trepidation, what solutions might […]

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 […]