As many commentators have outlined, there is currently a very high level of liquidity in the world economy, with risk premiums for emerging market bonds at low levels and high foreign investment in many countries. This can’t last, and serious fissures will open up when it changes.

University of Chicago Professor Steven Davis, at an American Enterprise Institute seminar Wednesday, presented an examination of the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures on job creation and destruction. Most interesting was a difference between the early 1990s recession and recovery and that following 2000: In the early 1990s there was a temporary increase in the […]

The second round of terrorist attacks on London’s transport system Thursday raised a disturbing spectacle of continued, albeit low level, terrorist attacks in the world’s major cities. Such attacks, even taken together, might produce fewer casualties than a single huge outrage such as that of September 11, 2001, but could have more pernicious long term […]

“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington” caroled Noel Coward in an inspired 1947 piece of career advice. The McKinsey Global Institute study “The Emerging Global Labor Market” presented at the Institute for International Economics Wednesday by the Institute’s Director Diana Farrell leads unquestionably to new advice for the Worthington family (if they […]

Discussion following Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement has centered on her potential successor’s views on abortion and wrongful imprisonment, the two areas in which the Angry Left is most hostile to the George W. Bush administration. Yet in reality there is a much more crucial question from the right: what is that successor’s […]

Richard Scrushy walked scot fee from the near collapse of Health South, while Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and John Rigas of Adelphia have received or will receive prison sentences of well over a decade for their crimes. 1990’s Business’s combination of lack of ethical scruples, excessive rewards and excessive penalties for […]

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 […]