Sir John Tenniel’s famous cartoon of 29th March 1890 shows the young Kaiser Wilhelm II “dropping the pilot” — the veteran Chancellor (1862-1890) Otto von Bismarck – and heading Germany into new and dangerous waters. Like Bismarck a towering figure, retiring Fed Chairman (1987-2006) Alan Greenspan, to be “dropped” Tuesday, has run U.S. monetary policy […]

President Jacques Chirac announced Thursday that France might respond with nuclear weapons to any terrorist attack, while Western concern intensified over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s apparent determination to develop nuclear weapons and wipe out Israel. The threat of a nuclear attack on a Western city is becoming more real by the day; it’s worth thinking […]

The fashionable cliché about the Federal Reserve’s current monetary policy is that it has created a “Goldilocks economy” in the United States, in which the economic porridge is neither too hot nor too cold, and moderate non-inflationary growth can continue ad infinitum. However, what if the “path of steady growth” onto which the Fed has […]

Russia’s cutoff of gas supplies to Ukraine Tuesday caused alarm in Western Europe, much of which is dependent on Russia for gas, but was quickly resolved. However a Russian state that controls important natural resources and that operates by nationalist whim rather than by market demands potentially imposes huge costs on Western economies. The “peace […]

The Bear’s Lair’s examination last week of Latin American economies, which concluded that excessive inequality has combined with democracy to leave them trapped in a morass of poor economic policy and minimal growth no doubt left domestically-oriented U.S. readers unmoved. They should start worrying – there’s considerable evidence the United States is heading in the […]