After an initial spot of trouble with the banks and General Motors, the 2008-09 recession has not been particularly painful in terms of corporate and governmental defaults. Recently Detroit defaulted in the largest municipal bankruptcy since the Great Depression, but Detroit has always seemed a special case. However the signs are growing that as U.S. […]

We live in a world in which international agencies have proliferated, both in the political and economic spheres. Economically, the World Bank and the IMF are paramount, and then there are the G8 group of leading advanced economies, the G20 group which accounts for some 85% of global GDP and other attendees at the G20 […]

Five years after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the U.S. economy was in deep trouble, but beginning to enjoy a vigorous recovery from the depths of a very unpleasant depression. The rest of the world, on the other hand, with the notable exception of Britain, was mired in Depression and in several cases Fascism. This […]

You can argue that Ronald Coase, who died this week, was a greater economist than Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman or Maynard Keynes (in descending order of competence). The Coase Theorem, propounded in his 1960 “The problem of social cost” is one of the most important rationales for distrusting state regulation, and preferring the tax […]

The Environmental Protection Agency has been pouring regulatory glue into the U.S. economy since 1973. The trial bar has also been pouring litigation glue into the U.S. economy for a similar period, and their colleagues in the New York financial bar have equally been adding to the sticky stuff with documentation glue (as a former […]