The Census Bureau issued the first results of the 2010 Census this week, showing that the U.S. growth in population in 2000-2010 was only 9.7%, the lowest decennial growth since the 1930s and the second lowest on record. This has modest if beneficial effects on our understanding of where the United States is today. However […]

At this season of goodwill, my thoughts immediately turn to that unsung hero Ebenezer Scrooge, and this year, in view of the subject’s topicality, to his possible thoughts on today’s major economic policy problem of tax reform and budget deficit reduction. One thing immediately springs to mind: he would wish to eliminate the income tax […]

The insouciant approach which President Obama and the US budget negotiators have taken to the federal deficit, adding around $900 billion to deficits over the next two years with no countervailing spending cuts, has been greeted by a sharp rise in Treasury bond yields. This brings into focus a very delicate question: at what point […]

The EU bailout of Ireland and its previous bailout for Greece, when examined closely, bore a distressing resemblance to the 2008 U.S. bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup. The authorities poured more resources into assets that had been shown to be defective, without sufficiently enforcing the painful purging and liquidation that was necessary. By […]

Germany’s success in 2010 has surprised most U.S. analysts, who tend to start every sentence about Europe with “sclerotic.” However it is by no means the only country which is recovering from the Great Recession in a remarkably healthy fashion. China, Chile and Singapore are also stand-outs in this respect, while the United States, Ireland […]

Global opposition to Ben Bernanke’s policy, World Bank president Robert Zoellick’s “trial balloon” and statements by some of the new Republican Congressional caucus have caused a modest revival in consideration of the Gold Standard. In my view, the chances of its revival by official means in the next ten years remain infinitesimal, but there is […]

As long-term U.S. interest rates rise and negative global reactions roll in to the Fed’s announcement November 3 of a further $600 billion round of “quantitative easing” purchases of Treasury bonds to the inquiring mind one question becomes uppermost: Even though there’s a huge amount of competition for this title, is it indeed possible that […]

It now looks as if 2011 will see a definitive showdown in which the Ben Bernanke Fed and its allies in sloppy monetary policy worldwide are finally forced to face up to the damage caused by their depredations. The new $600 billion round of “quantitative easing” by the Fed and the almost simultaneous Republican capture […]

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “Bear’s Lair” column. The first such column appeared on November 6, 2000, the eve of the Presidential election, with the headline “Dow crashes, Bush/Gore stunned in polls.” Its central thesis was that whoever won the election the following day would be a one-term President because of the […]

The foreclosure crisis has highlighted again a major flaw of our modern economy: the fragility of ownership and property rights in the Internet age. Quite apart from the possibility of an EMP field blanking out everybody’s servers, the sheer complexity of computer-managed structures such as securitization can make them very difficult if not impossible to […]