Japan and China, the world’s largest holders of foreign exchange reserves with $2 trillion between them are considering investing those reserves in the stock market. Russia has announced it will invest its $108 billion oil stabilization fund in foreign stocks. If you try to remember the last time major government money pools were punted in […]

China’s first quarter growth report of 11.5% and the market reaction thereto illustrated one market-forced dilemma faced by the world’s policymakers: in the long run, they can have cheap money or cheap commodities, but not both.

The decline of established institutions is supposed to be a liberating process, allowing individuals to express themselves fully and society to reach its potential through temporary structures that express its needs and values at a given time. Yet for those of us who are not 28 year old hedge fund traders, the new unstructured world […]

Takeover bids are generally thoroughly benign economic events; they are after all the principal process by which Joseph Schumpeter’s process of “creative destruction” takes place. Without them, with corporate governance currently weak as in Britain and the United States there would be no power to compel entrenched management to downsize itself, even when it was […]

The Cato Institute Thursday ran a seminar on “The Culture of Enterprise in an Age of Globalization” which brought up the question: to what extent is the United States still a free market economy? It certainly was a free market economy in 1925, or even in 1995, but in the last decade the balance of […]