In 2008 we have seen a Bear year of close to record-breaking proportions. The current record holder is 1931, when the Standard and Poors 500 Index was down 41.9%; a bad day this week could easily take it below the 853 at which its 2008 drop would equal that record. The market has by far […]

Perhaps the most sobering thing we have learned during 2008, or rather since the subprime crisis broke in the middle of 2007, is the benefit of transparency in business dealings. Time after time, when a fiasco has occurred, it has been due to a lack of transparency in a transaction or series of transactions. Subprime […]

Remember the Great Depression of 1921? Or of 1947? Or of 1981? Each of those years began with many of the same problems evident today, or that were evident in 1929-30. Yet they did not produce more than garden-variety recessions, which were soon over. It is instructive to examine why.

In spite of Friday’s alarming rise of 533,000 in unemployment, when you look at the near-term future, there still seems little chance that the current unpleasantness will turn into a re-run of the Great Depression, or anything like it. Gross Domestic Product may decline by more than the 3-4% declines seen in 1974 and 1981-82, […]

Two weeks ago, the stock market finally returned to its valuation levels of before the monetary bubble began in 1995, appropriately inflated for the rise in nominal Gross Domestic Product. The 4,000 on the Dow Jones index that was first reached within a week of Alan Greenspan’s February 23, 1995 Humphrey-Hawkins testimony loosening monetary policy […]

The financial services industry as we have known it since the early 1990s has effectively collapsed. Its flaws of over-optimistic risk management, aggressive rent extraction and excessive leverage have proved fatal, as was eventually inevitable. Since a modern economy cannot function without an adequate financial services sector it is not sufficient to push the remaining […]

There is a considerable argument between commentators at present as to whether, apart from a pretty painful recession, we are in for a bout of inflation or deflation. Both sides have apparently cogent arguments, and maintain their positions with considerable vigor. Robert Samuelson, having recently published a book “The Great Inflation” that suggested another burst […]

Investors have spent the last few weeks bemoaning the devastation to their portfolios caused by the stock market downturn, which if it does not produce recovery by year-end will have made 2008 the worst stock market year since 1937. Their misery would be compounded if they knew that next year, while it may avoid more […]

The number of economically damaging policy ideas imposed on the United States has greatly increased in the last few months. However from the statements of the Presidential candidates, the next few years may turn this storm of bad ideas into a blizzard. Those with an emotional attachment to the US economy should brace themselves for […]

Emerging market stock markets, bond markets and currencies have suffered much more than developed country markets during 2008, in spite of the original real estate bubble and credit disaster having been contained almost entirely in rich countries. That suggests that globalization, by which emerging markets gain capital and access to developed markets for their goods […]