The consolidation of the world’s stock exchanges appears to be taking shape, with the New York Stock Exchange bidding for the Paris-based Euronext and NASDAQ now owning a blocking 25 percent of the London Stock Exchange. Stock Exchange mergers and increasing technological sophistication are universally assumed to be a good thing; the next downturn is […]

The Wall Street Journal has consistently supported policies of cheap money and rapid legal and illegal immigration over the past few years. Last week its editorial line wavered, with a lengthy nuanced piece on immigration by James Q. Wilson and Peter Skerry Thursday and a lead editorial worrying about inflation Friday. Is this just a […]

President Evo Morales of Bolivia’s announcement May 1 that the country’s oil and natural gas resources would be nationalized, and Thursday he announced that this would be without compensation. By doing so, he exemplified both the Latin American disease, discussed here April 24, and an even more severe natural resource disease by which countries with […]

Gold closed at $686.50 per ounce, silver at $13.89 per ounce, copper at $3.4935 per pound and oil at $70.19 per barrel Friday, all of them far above those commodities’ price levels of January 1. Just how high can commodity prices soar, and what effect will it have?

We are used to thinking of the modern world as one of steadily rising productivity, where year by year through the application of new technologies workers achieve higher output per capita and wealth correspondingly increases. Yet in Latin America this is not the case; since 1980 productivity has been in steady decline, with the marvels […]