Fifteen years ago, it appeared that globalization was the most important trend of our time, and was irreversible. Since then the Doha round of trade talks has been stalled for years and even the modest progress trumpeted last December has been blocked by India, home of a new government supposedly dedicated to the free market. […]

As an instinctive opponent of Scottish independence but supporter of Britain leaving the EU I have to face an epistemological reality: the two positions are at first sight inconsistent with each other. As a rational man, I find that disquieting, so I thought I’d look at the economic effects of both moves and determine whether, […]

Traditionally, business was the most important political backer of free markets – which made sense, because business needs markets in order to exist at all. However in the last generation, the views of business, as expressed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outlets, have increasingly diverged from the free market ideal. As crony […]

A fascinating book “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives – A World Without World War I” by Richard Ned Lebow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) looks at history’s likely trajectory if the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip had missed and concludes that while much would be changed, we would at best be only modestly better off. However Lebow is not […]

The New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against Barclays’ dark pool is yet another example of banks’ increasing resemblance to asbestos manufacturers, but it also reflects an uncomfortable truth: Whether through “fast trading,” through the new area of “crypto-currencies” or through the increasing frailty of bank and corporate security systems, technology is transforming previously well understood […]

The French bank BNP Paribas is about to be fined $9-10 billion for doing business with Iran, a country with which the U.S. is finding common ground in Iraq. Since 2008, the U.S. and the trial bar have obtained fines and settlements from global banks totaling $88 billion (as of early June.) Now medium sized […]

Non-farm business productivity fell by 3.2% in the first quarter of 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ revised data. Most commentators have rather ignored this number. You expect productivity figures to be bad when GDP drops unexpectedly, as it did in the first quarter —after all the last such bad number was in […]

Eight years ago, the accountants Ernst and Young got in trouble with the Chinese authorities for estimating the bad debts in the Chinese banking system at $911 billion – it was especially tactless in that the major Chinese banks were mostly within months of doing IPOs in the international markets. Since then, the Chinese bad […]

Since the crash of 2008, huge attention has been paid by regulators to systemic risk, the risk that some event will cause the crash of the entire banking system, not just of an individual bank. Tens of thousands of pages of financial regulations have been written, and almost as many thousands of speeches have been […]

Good times tend to be relatively infertile of new economic ideas. Even radical economists, grinding their teeth at the apparent success of the market, don’t want to be accused of killing the golden-egg-laying goose. Conversely, bad times — lengthy or especially deep recessions – bring out the madmen from the woodwork, and bring with them […]