The late unlamented Senator Reed Smoot (R.-UT) was spiritually in full flow at the New America Foundation’s Forum on America’s Economic Future Wednesday, as Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, ex-Senator Tom Daschle (D.-SD) and Senators Richard Durbin (D.-IL) and Byron Dorgan (D.-ND) competed as to who could say the nastiest things about China. Presumably trade policy […]

Signs have multiplied recently that all is not well in the overworked, overpaid world of Wall Street. The Chairman of Morgan Stanley has been forced out, quarterly earnings are coming in generally down, and both JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup have been zapped with $2 billion legal settlements for misguided corporate finance work. Are these […]

“Three billion new capitalists,” a new book by Clyde Prestowitz, head of the Economic Strategy Institute, highlights the potential rewards and dangers to the U.S. economy inherent in the full emergence of India and China’s 2.5 billion people (and the former Soviet bloc’s 500 million) onto the world’s economic stage. Old patterns are dissolving, old […]

Richard Fischer, president of the Dallas Fed, caused rejoicing in the markets and doubtless several thousand more speculative house purchases Tuesday by suggesting that the Fed’s tightening cycle was “in its eighth inning.” One is again forced to conclude that central bank policy in a democratic fiat money system inevitably tends towards inflation and the […]