The Sears bankruptcy, and the Schumpeteran creative destruction in the shopping mall sector that will follow, feels like it has been coming for a long time – and it has. Ever since the Fed went off track from sound monetary policy in February 1995, ultra-low interest rates have created new unproductive investment and postponed necessary […]

It is a well-known economic principle, the central thesis of Adam Smith’s work, that competition between individual businesses produces better outcomes, while monopolies and oligopolies result in inefficiency and conspiracies against consumers’ interests. From the economic principles involved, the same is also true of governments. We should thus welcome nationalism and deplore both movements towards […]

In many areas, such as monetary policy, the U.S. Supreme Court, corporate Boards of Directors and Cabinet government, decisions are made by arriving at a group consensus. If the group is sufficiently intellectually diverse, this works well. There is however a pernicious danger, which we have seen in action many times in economic policy, where […]

The last two decades of low interest rates have seen a vast increase in the world’s stock of assets, measured at market value, largely matched by a corresponding increase in debt. However, the increase has not raised global productivity growth, which has slowed as the asset glut has increased. This points to a core economic […]

Ever since this column started in 2000, I have been writing that British house property is hopelessly overpriced. There is no question this has been spectacularly bad investment advice – Londoners who owned a home in 2000 have at least trebled their money since then, doubling it in real terms. Nevertheless, it is possible for […]