The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia established the principle that nation states could run their internal affairs as they pleased – it was no longer acceptable for Catholic states to invade Protestant states because they didn’t like their religion (or vice versa). Westphalianism proved a vital organizing principle for the next 300 years, allowing significant periods […]

At the Federal Open Market Committee meeting last week, policy remained unchanged, and the accompanying statement made the extraordinary claim that “measures of underlying inflation continue to be somewhat low, relative to levels that the Committee judges to be consistent, over the longer run, with its dual mandate.” The following day, the March Producer Price […]

For non-British readers, I should explain that the British TV advertisements for Hovis bread revolved around an intense misty-eyed nostalgia for the way things were, the supposedly simpler lives of a half-century ago. (In the United States the term “Hovis banking,” coined in the FT this week, might be replaced by “Jimmy Stewart banking,” referring […]

The awarding of a $36 billion tanker contract to Boeing illustrated the well-known difficulties caused by crony capitalism in the awarding of government contracts. However what is less well appreciated is the damaging effect that crony capitalism has in a number of other ways, making the economy less efficient and providing rent-seeking opportunities that are […]