Britain’s Euro-elections on May 23 resulted in the 6-week-old Brexit Party getting 32% of the British vote and 29 MEPs, becoming the (equal) largest single MEP bloc in the European Parliament. With Theresa May’s resignation the following day, it opened a clear route for a full exit from the European Union and a new and […]

“Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders” wrote the Qianlong Emperor to George III through Lord Macartney in 1793. That turned out not to be true for Qianlong and his immediate successors, and China’s history over the next two centuries was an unhappy one. But […]

Investment bankers are very slow learners. That’s the only lesson that can be drawn from the catastrophic failure of the Uber Inc (NYSE:UBER) initial public offering. As this column has been writing for years, it was perfectly obvious that a loss-making taxi service with software attached was never going to be worth $100 billion. Frankly, […]

Thomas Friedman’s 2005 “The World is Flat” postulated a world growing ever closer together, with diminishing barriers both trade and political and a gradual move towards at least elements of world government. With all due respect to Mr. Friedman, this never happened, and does not appear likely to. The questions that arise are: Why not? […]

Philipp Blom’s “Nature’s Mutiny” (Liveright, 2019) looks at the Little Ice Age of 1560-1700 and demonstrates that, whereas the first generation afflicted by unexpected cold weather sat around moaning about God not loving them, after about 40 years more intelligent responses occurred, such as improvements in agriculture, a massive growth in international trade and the […]

President Trump is said to demand a folder of favorable news clippings every morning, and to refuse to deal with bad news, delegating it to staff. This runs contrary to the “buck stops here” ethos of the American Presidency, and to management textbooks which demand that the CEO be informed of all problems. Yet the […]

As this column forecast four weeks ago, Treason in the Brexit process prospered, and Brexit has been postponed to October 31. Businesses groaned, as the uncertainty prolonged itself to an unendurable length. Most likely, Brexit will now either be abandoned or diluted to a degree where Britain does not break free of the EU’s regulatory […]

Ray Dalio, self-made CEO of the Bridgewater hedge fund group, the largest such operation in the country, says capitalism is broken. His solution, unsurprisingly, is a mix of higher taxes and more public spending – just the mix that will pull up the drawbridge up behind him and prevent younger people replicating his success. From […]

We are accustomed to thinking of the tech sector as a beacon of hope, leading us to a bright gadget-filled future, in which everybody’s lives will be richer. Yet evidence is mounting that the reverse is in many cases happening. Fueled by immense amounts of private equity money, tech companies are reinventing established businesses – […]

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-NY) will turn 35 on October 13, 2024 and is therefore eligible to run for President in the election of that year. By that time, two terms of President Trump will have tired the nation of solid, sober, well-managed government and the electorate will be keen to try something new. With its […]