“Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason,” wrote the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington. The news that Tony Blair has been helping Emanuel Macron thwart Britain’s attempts to escape the clutches of the EU fits Harington’s epigram as never before. For if indeed Britain becomes trapped […]

The Trump administration and some Congressional Republicans want to expand the H1B and H2B immigration programs. Under these programs – H1B for skilled labor, H2B for unskilled — immigrants can work only for their sponsoring employers and must leave the United States if that employment ends. They cannot participate in the free U.S. labor market […]

Japan has had a rough 30 years of no growth with soaring public debt and zero interest rates. In the same period, China’s economy has taken off at record-breaking speed – as we now learn, with considerable cheating on intellectual property protections and the like. On closer examination, the two phenomena are closely connected, with […]

This week, we learned that a hedge fund and the credit default swap (CDS) market had pushed a regional telecom company, Windstream Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:WIN) into bankruptcy. The toxic CDS product caused havoc in 2008, and regulators have been their usual ineffectual selves in failing to grasp it since. There is no legal way to […]