The current market consensus has the world economy continuing to grow, with modest inflation brought under control by a modest further increase in interest rates, and the worst case scenario being a mild downturn like those of 1990-91 (outside Britain, where it was severe) and 2001-02. Anything worse is thought to be unlikely; central banks […]

Prognosticating for China is extraordinarily difficult; optimists and pessimists see an entirely different future for the country. China has neither political freedom nor a true market economy, and its economic statistics are as unreliable as those of the old Soviet bloc. Thus conventional economics is useless. Economic forces with the inevitability of gravity in a […]

Stock markets around the world were spooked last week by an apparent resurgence in inflation and central banks’ worldwide attempts to combat it. To a bearish observer, the current market jitters raise a quite different question: why, in the face of low interest rates and rapid money creation over an entire decade since 1995, didn’t […]

In a week when President George W. Bush has appointed Goldman Sachs chairman Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury, to the cheers of commentators, it’s worth looking at the economic views a successful investment banker might be expected to have, and how those views have typically changed over the decades.