Close observers of the US housing finance disaster in recent months will have noted a curious phenomenon. Companies such as Countrywide that were in late August regarded as rock solid have recently passed clearly into the danger zone while those like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were regarded as potential market saviors have come […]

As the US political season moves into high gear, a full year before it will blessedly end, the thought inevitably occurs to an economy-minded person: how much do all these politicians cost? Not simply the cost of their endless and annoying campaigns, but the money diverted to economically inferior uses by political pressure, the mistakes […]

It is already clear that one of the great election issues of 2008 will be the relative impoverishment of the American middle class, defined in the American rather than the British sense to include well established blue collar workers with families and mortgages. Republicans who ignore this problem will find themselves talking only to the […]

The last quarter century has seen the explosion of a profession, financial engineering, that has provided innumerable lucrative opportunities for otherwise indigent mathematicians — it was thus welcomed by a former mathematician like myself! Nevertheless the turbulence in the bond markets in the last couple of months, at a time when the world economy’s prospects […]