President Trump’s announcement last week that the fee for H1B visa applicants would rise to $100,000 should be welcomed. The much-abused and abusive temporary worker H1B, H2A, and H2B visa programs, greatly expanded by the late unlamented President George H.W. Bush, have been artificially wrecking the living standards of ordinary Americans for decades. This is […]

The collapse of Tricolor, a $1bn subprime private credit lender making loans to those without Social Security numbers, is a rather small canary in a very large coal mine: the $3 trillion private credit industry. That industry has been fueled by “funny money” credit availability and represents a poisoning of the existing global credit system, […]

President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is […]

President Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has caused anguished squawking about the loss of Fed independence. Yet experience since 1998 has shown that Bank of England independence has produced worse outcomes than before, and the world’s independent central banks’ overall performance has been thoroughly third-rate. Central bank independence without firm policy guidelines […]

President Trump’s decision to take a 10% share stake in Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) as part of the deal for the Biden administration’s excessive handouts to a failing company was arguably a good one. However, the original CHIPS Act was economically damaging while suggestions by NEC Chairman Kevin Hassett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that there might […]