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.

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 […]

Entrepreneurship is popularly held to be the principal reason for the success of the U.S. economy, when contrasted with the failures of “Old Europe.” Yet if, as discussed here last week, U.S. productivity is increasing no faster than that in Europe, some seeds of doubt must be sown. Is there such a thing as too […]

Every year or so Bear’s Lair examines productivity, supposedly the engine of a remarkable economic revival in the United States in the last decade, and a rationale for ever rising stock prices. The publication March 24 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of multifactor productivity trends leads once again to the inescapable conclusion: the productivity […]

The Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday voted out an immigration bill directly contrary to that passed by the House of Representatives last year; it provided amnesty through a guest worker program for illegal immigrants, but included few significant enforcement measures either on the border or on employers. Since a “reconciliation” of two bills pointing in opposite […]

Commentators right and left disagree about the short term outlook for the U.S. economy, but they agree almost unanimously on the long term – living standards for nearly all Americans will maintain and extend the huge increase they have enjoyed since at least 1900. Regrettably the long term future, as well as the short term, […]