The Eurozone appears to be trying to do things the hard way. It has softened conditions on Greece, while promising an unlimited fund to buy debt of the other PIGGY governments and supporting the creation of a supranational banking regulator. In the short term, this has quieted market speculation. In the long term it has […]

Friday was the 25th anniversary of Black Monday, October 19 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, or 22.6%, the S&P 500 Index fell 20.5% while the Nasdaq index (which few people followed in those pre-dotcom days) fell 11.4%. It was a worse one-day fall than in 1929, and was generally expected […]

Mitt Romney in a speech at Virginia Military Institute October 8, said there was a “longing” for American leadership in the Middle East and laid out a foreign policy agenda that differed little from that of George W. Bush. As such a policy would more or less remove any possible savings from budget economy, leading […]

Robert Gordon, of Northwestern University, has aroused fear among conventional commentators by his paper (NBER Working Paper 18315) suggesting that U.S. economic growth has begun to slow inexorably, and that it will cease altogether, slowing to the sluggish levels prevailing before the Industrial Revolution, by 2100. To some extent, these arguments are familiar, having appeared […]

No less an authority than Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at the Clinton Global Initiative last week that the United States could risk its status as the world’s reserve currency if Congress fails to act and the “fiscal cliff” program of spending cuts and tax increases is enacted January 1. Actually Blankfein’s statement was […]