The World Economic Forum last week issued its “Global Risks 2014” annual report, supposedly outlining the risks that could cause real trouble in the next decade. A lot of it was fashionable pap – for example, even if global warming is real, it doesn’t have time to get up much momentum or do much real […]

Policymakers and investors have been remarkably sanguine in the first few weeks of the year, appearing to believe that the problems bedeviling the global economy since 2008 are being alleviated, and that the solutions produced for those problems will not themselves produce further and worse pathologies. Yet in one area that confidence seems ill-conceived, that […]

As we head towards the fifth anniversary of the current bull market in March, fundamentalist investors may be feeling a little aggrieved. Certainly in the last year, if they bought stocks on the principles pioneered by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd in their 1940 classic “Security Analysis” they are likely to have underperformed the Standard […]

The Democrat playbook for 2014, we are told, intends to focus on U.S. inequality, and to suggest that only redistributive taxation will solve it or even alleviate it. Certainly it’s possible to reduce inequality through punitive levels of taxation – at the cost of making everybody poorer. I thus though it worthwhile to disentangle the […]