The Wall Street Journal this week defended executive compensation by citing the case of Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart (NYSE:WMT) since 2014, who in the year to January 31, 2025 earned $27.4 million. With a good track record in a company with $681 billion in revenues and 2.1 million employees worldwide, that amount was reasonable […]

The Federal Reserve at its October 28-29 meeting announced that it would stop reducing the size of its balance sheet and instead begin a renewed “quantitative easing” buying bonds from the market. In other words, the central bank will once again finance the government’s budget deficit, a flagrant violation of Monetary Policy 101. As I […]

The lengthy government shutdown of October-November 2025 suggests that the U.S. constitutional structure is faulty – no sensible system could possibly be designed for such frequent failure. Yet in its early decades, both before and after the dark cloud of slavery was forcibly removed, the system worked quite well – children were brought up on […]

This week, the Bear’s Lair column celebrates its Silver Jubilee. The first column appeared mid-afternoon on Election Day 2000, predicting a massive market slump (this is a Bearish column, after all!) and an electoral wipeout in 2004 for the then unknown winner of the 2000 presidential election. The full 25 years of columns can now […]