In the last week, the detailed revelations from J.P. Morgan’s Senate grilling have combined with the Cyprus rescue blunder to generate one inescapable conclusion: public or private sector, European or American, there isn’t a decent, competent banker among them. Truly almost twenty years of funny money and 30-40 years of misguided deregulation have drained the […]

The Keynesian U.S. commentariat, which includes quite a high percentage of nominal Republicans, has been proclaiming a “contradiction” between the needs of economic policy. The need to cut government spending to reduce the deficit is supposedly balanced by ill-effects from declines in government employment – even the Wall Street Journal’s economics blog claimed that the […]

Benn Steil’s excellent new study “The Battle of Bretton Woods” (Princeton, 2013) focuses on the 1944 global monetary conference as a struggle between its two principal protagonists, the U.S. Treasury’s Harry Dexter White, and Britain’s celebrity economist, Maynard Lord Keynes. Even Steil, an American who has considerable sympathy with Keynes, is quite clear that he […]

Britain lost its AAA credit rating from Moody’s last week, amidst much wailing from the government and cries of triumph from the opposition that had been largely responsible for the country’s declining creditworthiness. However, since the United States lost its AAA from Standard and Poor’s in 2011, with no visible adverse effects on its bond […]