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 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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for demonstrating the centrality of monetary policy to an economy. As a profound believer in monetarism, I would be the last to question his wisdom. Nevertheless, there are times when other economic events have made any politically feasible monetary policy entirely irrelevant. In the United States, we now appear […]