Gosh, this is exciting! The Dow Jones Industrial share index peaked at 11,722.98 on January 14, 2000. Its rise in the past few weeks has brought it within shouting distance of the best known of all stock charting patterns, the double top reversal. If you believe the charts, the stage is being set for a […]

Bruce Bartlett’s book “Imposter – How George W. Bush bankrupted America and betrayed the Reagan legacy” met with an enthusiastic reception at the Cato Institute Tuesday, as well as with predictable derision from Bush-supporting commentators elsewhere. However, Bartlett’s scathing criticisms of Bush didn’t include much on what a “good” President might have done instead. I […]

The financial services business in the past 25 years has been repeatedly deregulated, and has benefited from immense advances in technology, all in the interests of greater efficiency. Yet its employment has increased, as has its share in value added terms in the U.S. economy — from 4.55 percent of the economy in 1977 to […]

The Whigs of 19th Century Britain were notorious for applying free market economic doctrine beyond the point at which it became invalid, thus causing the Irish potato famine and the gradual hollowing out of British industry, hobbled by unilateral free trade. The controversial sale of Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) to the state […]

The recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report decrying economic performance in Europe was predictably received with gloating by the bulls of Wall Street and the George W. Bush administration. Yet they should not be so quick to gloat; the European economic model is stronger than it appears, and the U.S. model weaker.

The U.S. Treasury reopened the 30 year Treasury bond market Thursday, with the first 30 year bond issue since such issues were suspended in 2001. The issue of $14 billion 4.5 percent bonds due February 2036 was twice covered on a yield of 4.530 percent, with an indirect bid from domestic institutions and foreign central […]

About the only bipartisan cheers in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday came with his claim that the United States was “addicted to oil” and the inevitable proposals thereafter for various state subsidies to new energy research. Yet neither the diagnosis nor the proposed cure make sense, since they bear little […]

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 […]