Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke loses sleep over the possibility that the United States may suffer a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression. Inflation hawks and opponents of President Obama’s Keynesian “stimulus” warn continually of a possible repeat of the 1970s stagflation. Yet recent data is beginning to suggest a more unpleasant possibility still: that the […]

The United States is often held out as the world’s principal beacon of free-market principle. To the extent that it backslides, there is thought to be little hope for such principles in other countries. Yet as last week’s housing finance debate demonstrated again, the United States was populist before it was capitalist, and free-market principles […]

The last 15 years in global markets have been marked by one consistent factor: the ready availability, even overabundance of capital. Returns to investors have been driven down to dangerously low levels, both in debt and equity, by over-expansionary monetary policy, while asset values even after crashes have been far higher than their historical norms. […]

Observers have been startled by the recent slowing of US economic recovery. A recession as deep as that of 2008-09 would normally be followed by a recovery of exceptional vigor. Austrian and other anti-Keynesian commentators, myself included, have pointed the finger of blame at the excessive fiscal stimulus of 2009-10 and at the locked-in Fed […]

Niall Ferguson’s new biography of Siegmund Warburg is interesting in many respects, but it illuminates in particular one aspect of Warburg’s belief system: even in the latter part of his life — the 1950s through his death in 1982 — he believed that he was witnessing the decline of European civilization. Given that he saw […]