Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty First Century” has received rave reviews among the sort of commentators who are looking always for reasons to dump capitalism in the dustbin of history and resuscitate the Marxism they enjoyed in college (there are a LOT of these people). His central thesis is that if the return on […]

The Global Financial Center Index, released last week, showed that New York had supplanted London as the world’s premier financial center, albeit by a tiny margin of 2 points out of 1,000. With British financial capability hollowed out, and nearly all the major London investment banking operations foreign-owned, it’s a change that has been coming […]

Since November 2012, the world has been watching for the outcome of Japan’s experiment in “Abenomics,” a bold policy experiment that attempted to put the country on a faster growth track. The results are now coming in, and on balance the experiment appears to be failing. That’s not very surprising – one of its central […]

In a piece “Dinosaur tail risks” published on January 27, I discussed the various unlikely things that could go wrong with the world economy, mentioning well into the second page the faint possibility of a global war, since the global geopolitical system appeared as fragile as that governing before 1914. . Well, that didn’t take […]

The disappearance of the Bitcoin trading website Mt. Gox caused consternation among younger libertarians, who had seen crypto-currencies like Bitcoin as a vital weapon in the struggle against Big Government. For those like myself with almost as much suspicion of the tech sector as I have of Washington, it caused a smile of grim satisfaction. […]