The death of Antonin Scalia throws the future of the U.S. Supreme Court into flux, while Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are achieving some electoral success while proudly flouting their contempt for property rights. With year upon year of zero or even negative interest rates worldwide, Maynard Keynes’ “euthanasia of the rentier” seems ever closer. […]

The Gods of the Copybook Headings have been asleep for the last four years, as the miserable state of my stock portfolio can attest. Assets that were overvalued at the end of 2011 have got more overvalued, inflation that should have appeared due to funny money hasn’t, U.S. stock prices have trended steadily upward, as […]

Arrests have been made in China over a $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme involving a P2P (person-to-person, without the intervention of a bank) lender. My first response was: P2P lending in the Chinese banking system: what could possibly go wrong? My second, more thoughtful, insight is that distinguishing out-and-out Ponzi schemes from the world economy as […]

Donald Trump currently looks likely to win the Republican Presidential nomination and it appears Bernie Sanders has a decent shot at the Democrat one. The two candidates have unexpectedly strong support from voters who normally do not participate in elections and, although they are nominally from opposite political poles, their economic nostrums have a lot […]