The Martin Hutchinson Place
Following the discovery of fraud at the German payments processor Wirecard, the media are asking how German regulators can be so clueless. That is the wrong question. If anybody can make regulation work Germans, precise, efficient, un-corrupt and indomitable can do so. So, the problem must be, not that German regulators are inept, but that […]
An Oxford-Said Business School study this week demonstrated that private equity returns have not been higher than public equity returns over the lengthy period since 2006. Similar studies have shown that hedge fund returns, theoretically not correlated to equity returns, have also grown increasingly inferior. Since both types of investment have created new billionaires from […]
There has been a cry among the college-educated left this week to “defund the police.” For normal citizens, especially those living in big cities, that is a terrible idea – the crime rates of the 1970s and 1980s are not something they want to return to. However, it is clear that much of the unhappiness […]
We have heard a great deal about excessive inequality in the United States, which has among other things been used to justify the recent rioting. Historical comparisons however show that inequality is not especially high by the standards of the past, though it has certainly risen over the last thirty years. Yet the solution to […]
Governments and central banks worldwide have responded to the Covid-19 epidemic by massive doses of monetary and fiscal stimulus. Little of the money thrown at the problem has done any good. However, the further economic distortions governments have caused will have one long-term effect: they will delay and enfeeble recovery. Ever since 1929, government actions […]