Bloomberg Businessweek May 29 had a fascinating article propounding a “Big Mac” labor value theory, and using it to suggest that all restrictions to international migration were economically damaging. I have disagreed strongly with that conclusion from time to time in this column beginning in 2004, but yet found the basic data evidence compelling. I […]

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 […]

With the French election’s first round and the revelations about the Target-2 payments system, the euro’s prognosis worsened sharply this week. Having generally been a supporter of the euro, provided Britain didn’t have to join, I now think flaws in its design and poor policy choices have made it a disaster in waiting. Markets were […]

The French presidential election on April 22 and May 6 is important not only to France; on it rests the future of the euro. Spain, about which the markets have been agonizing for the last few weeks, is merely a sideshow; it has only moderate levels of international debt and could at a pinch be […]

According to economic historian Angus Maddison, Latin America had six among the world’s 30 richest economies in 1900. Today the continent’s richest country, by purchasing power parity GDP per capita, is Argentina, at No. 55, according to the IMF. Yet the continent is not short of natural resources, not overpopulated, and avoided the catastrophic carnage […]

The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every […]

The U.S. Department of Defense budget was $680 billion in the year to September 2012. The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget was only $17 billion. Yet when you compare the cost to the U.S. and global economy of the two departments, the comparison reverses. With modern rules of engagement and care for civilian populations, and politicians’ […]

Younger readers probably don’t remember this, but before 1980 much of the world was subjected to extraordinarily high marginal tax rates – 91% in the United States before 1964, 98% in Britain from 1974-79 (and 135% in 1968). The Laffer Curve, which states that tax revenues are zero at marginal tax rates of 0% and […]