My apologies, first, for the hiatus in columns last week – I was moving from Vienna, VA., a suburb of Washington DC to Poughkeepsie NY, a semi-suburb (it’s 73 miles away) of New York. Many have clearly regarded this as an eccentric choice, and much of the motivation stems from things like hating the Washington […]

A few weeks ago, I compared Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to the Weimar Republic central banker Rudolf von Havenstein. The comparison looks even better after the Fed’s non-performance April 27 and the markets’ subsequent response. Even the more cautious members of the general media are beginning to compare the current outlook to that of the […]

The publicity surrounding the “Atlas Shrugged” movie got me to thinking again about the central premise in the book. For those who have not read it, Ayn Rand’s book postulates that all the entrepreneurs and people of great ability withdraw their services from the U.S. economy, retreating to an undiscovered mountain valley in the Rockies […]

The philosopher Friedrich Hegel propounded the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis as one of the major logical processes by which knowledge gets advanced. We are now seeing its operation in the global energy market. From the thesis of a free-market energy menu consisting largely of fossil fuel energy sources and an antithesis of a highly […]

The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report, released Wednesday, said global financial stability had improved in the last six months. They must be the only people who think so. In reality, the U.S. budget deficit has widened in spite of the economic recovery, the financial services sector is undertaking ever more preposterous deals, storing up trouble […]

The news that Portugal has requested a bailout from the EU is hardly surprising. The outgoing socialist government, having wrecked the economy and emptied the government coffers, wants to tie down its center-right successor, due to be elected June 5. Similarly, when later this year Spain finds itself in similar or worse trouble and approaching […]

Multifactor productivity data, announced to little fanfare last week, showed a sharp downward revision for 2008-09, with a net fall over the two years. The quinquennium 2005-09 had the lowest average multifactor productivity growth of any quinquennium since 1978-82, at a beggarly 0.2% per annum.. Lovers of the current economic order like to trumpet the […]

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 […]