Japan announced this week that it was partially withdrawing its planned Post bank privatization, so that the government would retain a third of the bank’s shares. Meanwhile the latest Japanese budget shows a deficit of 10% of GDP, at a time when Japanese public debt exceeds 200% of GDP. Through two decades of economic malaise, […]

The news that four banks are being charged with fraud for their sales of derivatives to the City of Milan was no doubt met with derision in trading rooms across the globe. Yet the prosecutors have a point, as does a similar prosecution relating to Jefferson County, Alabama, or potentially one in relation to the […]

Over the past 50 years, the United States and most other wealthy economies have moved to a system of managerial capitalism, in which resources are controlled, not by the owners of those resources but by a cadre of professional management, that leeches more and more returns out of the system. No viable economic theory suggests […]

With the retirement of Fed Vice-Chairman Donald Kohn, President Obama now has the right to appoint three Fed governors. Together with the reappointed Bernanke and Daniel Tarullo, whom he appointed last year, that will create a Fed Board of Governors on which five of the seven members are extreme soft-money advocates, and make it almost […]

Ben Bernanke reaffirmed this week that short-term interest rates would be kept at their current ridiculously low rates for “an extended period.” Apart from the danger of inflation this produces there is another problem: Fed monetary policies in the last decade have done great and possibly permanent damage to the US propensity to save. The […]