At the end of the 1983 movie “Trading Places,” the Duke brothers’ solid, long-established commodities business has been bankrupted in the orange juice pits by the insider-trading young sleazebags Winthorpe and Valentine, and the Dukes realize to their horror that trading has closed and the screens are dead. “Turn them back on” they cry feebly […]

Maynard Keynes, as a good left-liberal, was a political admirer of an earlier Cambridge alumnus Oliver Cromwell, and certainly regarded himself as part of the “Roundhead” tradition. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that, just as Cromwell’s virtues and policies pointed Britain on the road to the Industrial Revolution, so the vices and profligacies inspired […]

Jack Welch, former GE Chairman (1981-2000) who died last week, was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine in 1999. Twenty years later, we can see clearly that the Manager of the 20th century was not Welch but Alfred P. Sloan, CEO and then Chairman of General Motors (1920-1963). Welch’s main achievement was destroying […]

President Donald Trump last week pardoned Mike Milken, the effective originator of the junk bond market, who had been sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1990 for mysterious securities infractions. While I have considerable sympathy for Milken himself (not that he needs it, being worth $3.8 billion) I thought it worth performing the thought-experiment: […]

The fancy-college-educated left take great satisfaction in proclaiming that robots will soon threaten blue-collar jobs, while skills requiring higher education will be immune from competition driven by artificial intelligence (AI). This is surely incorrect. Robots/AI can in principle reproduce any predictable process, whether mechanical or intellectual. They cannot reproduce unexpected movement, leaps of imagination or […]

If you had bought South Sea Company shares 300 years ago today, on February 17, 1720, you would have paid the inflated price of about £175 per share. If you had sold those shares at any time before the end of September 1720, you would have made a fine profit, more than five times your […]

On July 6, 1988 European Commission President Jacques Delors propounded the hope that “Ten years hence, 80% of our economic legislation, and perhaps even our fiscal and social legislation as well, will be of Community origin.” The EU has not lost this ambition; this week Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, attempted to prevent […]

Classical economics holds that economic decisions are made by rational decision makers, using solid information and reason. Behavioral economics holds that many economic decisions are based on “cognitive biases” such as an aversion to losses that is stronger than the desire for profits. Richard Robb’s new book “Willful” holds that many decisions are made without […]

With U.S. debt at record levels, enthusiasm is mounting for a debt jubilee, in which part of or all the mountain of debt would be written off, to the great relief of debtors and the despair and probable bankruptcy of creditors. The jubilee’s proponents point out that debt jubilees have Biblical sanction, being a standard […]

The last five years have been marked in most Western societies by a populist revolt against the values of a leftist university-educated elite. That elite had appeared invulnerable, and increasingly separated from the rest of us, as Charles Murray described in his 2012 study “Coming Apart.” There are thus two questions to be answered: how […]