Month: May 2007

The Bear’s Lair: The return of political risk

The assaults on foreign investors by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez highlight one inexorable fact: political risk is back, and it’s here to stay. International investors who seek to analyze risk by purely economic means ignore it at their peril.

The Bear’s Lair: The end of the classless society

The immigration bill brought forward and apparently likely to pass demonstrates an unattractive new political trend in the United States: the end of the classless society for which the U.S. has been famous and the opening of yawning political as well as economic gaps between rich and poor.

The Bear’s Lair: Washing their hands in bubbles

The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the People’s Bank of China have this week all been faced with the same unpleasant reality: by their irresponsible monetary policies they have enabled gigantic asset bubbles that are redistributing wealth towards the criminal classes and in the long run will impoverish everybody else. Their reaction has […]

The Bear’s Lair: The end of oil security

By seizing control of the Orinoco tar sands Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delivered a stunning blow to US oil security. If the world economy worked in the way postulated by the globalizers his action would hardly have mattered, except to the unfortunate shareholders of the affected oil companies. However, the world economy doesn’t work […]