Gordon Gekko isn’t the only jailbird 1980s financier to make a comeback this year. The junk bond market, largely the brainchild of Drexel Burnham’s Michael Milken, is set to have a record year. The difference between the two: Gekko’s financing strategies were sounder. It is now possible to identify the next bubble being blown and […]

As higher education costs escalate faster than inflation, while the global job market remains largely depressed, increasing numbers of commentators are questioning the value of higher education as a whole. The question becomes more urgent, as state budgets become increasingly burdened by higher education’s further expansion. However the answer to the question of education’s value […]

The appointment of trader/investment banker Bob Diamond to head Barclays Bank last week renewed calls for government to force a split between banking and investment banking, while in retaliation Barclays threatened to relocate its headquarters abroad. To most commentators, that seemed an overwhelming danger, but I was forced to wonder: if the behemoth “investment banking” […]

One of the great myths that sustained the late twentieth century economy was that of exponential growth. Technological change was supposed to be moving ever faster, and so economic growth would naturally also be exponential, making us all richer than our parents and immeasurably richer than our grandparents. Since 2000, this seems to have gone […]