After an unexpected decline in the country’s third quarter GDP, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called an early election last week, while postponing implementation of a sales tax rise into 2017. The global media were generally laudatory, explaining how he could extend his program of indeterminate “reform” while stimulating the economy further by means of […]

One of the courses I did at business school was “Analysis of Financial Reports” where we learned to deconstruct all the scam accounts that had proliferated in the late 1960s boom – most of which companies, undone by negative cash flow, went bust after 1970. We were informed by the professor that the Financial Accounting […]

Japan caused a euphoric rise in global stock markets last week by raising the cap on its “quantitative easing” purchases of government bonds to 80 trillion yen a year ($720 billion, some 14% of Japan’s GDP.) Yet even with the huge “stimulus” and the declining yen to which it has led, Japan can still barely […]

The average earnings of U.S. men with only a high school diploma between 25 and 34 have fallen 25% since 1979, according to Census Bureau data. Admittedly women in the same category have done better – but their earnings have still fallen. Given that GDP per capita has risen 73% in real terms since 1979 […]