The Facebook initial public offering, with its combination of management arrogance, private equity greed and Nasdaq ineptitude, has certainly changed the atmosphere in the U.S. and global stock markets. The question is whether, like the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger of 2000, it has merely marked the peak of a temporary bubble or whether it marked […]

The French and Greek elections have made the “austerity” programs favored by Angela Merkel and other sensible policymakers seem politically highly unattractive (never mind that the spending cuts proposed by the austere have almost universally not happened, while tax increases have been onerous.) Consequently, Keynesians worldwide are recommending further bouts of government spending combined with […]

My old friend and former colleague Martin Sieff has produced a splendid riposte to Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and “That used to be us” entitled “That should still be us” (Wiley, $22.95). Yet while I agree with much of Sieff’s critique of the Friedman worldview, I can’t help thinking he falls into the […]