Month: September 2018

The Bear’s Lair: The happy new world of tariffs

As President Trump imposes tariffs on China and elsewhere, much dark muttering is heard from the media and conventional economists about Smoot-Hawley and the 1930s. They are too gloomy. Two factors have changed since the 1930s: bloated government and the invention of computers, and their combination means that the Victorian dream of universal free trade […]

The Bear’s Lair: Learning the right lessons from 2008

Learning the right lessons from financial crises is tough. The 1929 stock market crash was blamed for all the ills of the Great Depression that succeeded it and led to two decades of regulation and socialism. In 1720, the British tried to stop all new company formations while the French gave up on finance altogether […]

The Bear’s Lair: The Marie Antoinette economy

The Financial Times this week reviewed yet another adulatory biography of John Law, the financier/swindler/Keynesian responsible for France’s Mississippi Company disaster of 1716-20. Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office published a suitably gloomy study of the budget cuts needed to stabilize U.S. public debt. With a massive financial crash coming, an inability to finance the government’s […]

The Bear’s Lair: The delusions of infrastructure

President Trump is wise in many things, but he has two economic beliefs that are irredeemably foolish: low interest rates and infrastructure. To the joy of die-hard Hillary-lovers, I now propose to criticize one of those two beliefs: that in infrastructure. By and large, it is thoroughly overpriced currently, and very often yields far more […]