Since 2008 there has been a huge tightening of bank regulation, attempting to prevent a repeat of the meltdown. Capital requirements have been greatly increased, although a number of the regulatory loopholes in the previous system have been left open. However not enough attention has been paid to the interaction between the new regulatory standards […]

One year ago, in a year-end column for 2012, I predicted that the easy money bubble would continue inflating through 2013, which should be a good year for asset prices, but that 2014 would be more problematic. Having been “right so far” with this prediction, I thought it worth re-examining, to determine whether the crash […]

The excitement over Bitcoin is intense, with the artificial currency soaring to over $1,200 last week, from less than a dollar two years ago. Observers have compared it to the 1999 dot-com mania; more historically-minded observers have compared it to the British South Sea Bubble of 1720. But there is an even closer analogy. Unlike […]

The crash of 2008 seemed to put an end to the inexorable advance of financial services’ share of the economy over the preceding quarter century. Yet in 2009-11 the financial sector rebounded, aided by ultra-low interest rates and a steep yield curve, locking in jumbo profits for even the doziest megabank. It seemed that a […]

Predictors – including this column – have been confounded by strange economic behavior in the five years since the 2008 downturn. For monetarists, whether Friedmanite or Austrian like myself, the strangest feature has been the failure of inflation to re-emerge, in spite of massive overstimulation of the money supply and prolonged negative real interest rates. […]