The Martin Hutchinson Place
Ever since the Bretton Woods exchange rate system ended in 1971, the world has used exchange rates between most currencies that float freely. After 54 years, we can surely say this has not worked; the dollar price of gold, the truest indicator of real inflation, is approaching 100 times its $35 Bretton Woods price. The […]
CDU chief Friedrich Merz’s economically suicidal net-zero constitutional change in the Bundestag and the recent spate of anti-capitalist legal judgements in Britain and the U.S. highlight the alarming rise in economic illiteracy not only in the legal profession, but among politicians, journalists and pundits in general. Big Government, regulation and above all the rise of […]
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney flew to London last week for talks with Britain’s Kier Starmer, both of them upset about President Trump’s aggression, populism and protectionism. Starmer’s immediate instinct, to snuggle ever closer to the corrupt rotting carcass of the European Union will do Britain no good, nor will Carney’s instinct to create a […]
Those still supporting globalist free-trade high-immigration policies are accused of “Zombie Reaganism,” though that policy mix is more Zombie Bushism, derived from the gimcrack “Washington Consensus.” Now Zombie Reaganites, notably Dan McLaughlin of “National Review” have accused President Trump’s followers of “Zombie McKinleyism” – support of high tariffs and protectionism generally — and suggested they […]
The Atlanta Fed’s advance estimate of Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter has recently turned sharply negative, to caterwauling glee from the usual suspects in the media and the Blob. Their rapture is economically irrational; GDP was deliberately designed to include government spending, thus flattering orgies of waste such as the Biden administration. It […]
Germany’s voters last week produced a massive demand for greater freedom, with the nationalist AfD’s share of the vote more than doubling to 20.8%. The outgoing government parties all did badly, the SPD losing 9% of the vote, the Greens 3% and the free-market FDP damaged so badly by its participation in the socialist coalition […]
President Trump wants lower interest rates. That is natural; he is by profession a real estate developer and low interest rates make real estate developers’ lives easier and more profitable. However, when the Fed’s inflation target is 2% and actual inflation is 3%, interest rates below 5% or so wreck the economy in the long-term. […]
Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people […]
Editor’s Note: The Bear’s Lair is happily continuing for the foreseeable future as we were never dependent on USAID funding. Our sincerest condolences to our suddenly impoverished fellow writers. President Trump has had a very successful first few weeks in office, issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders that not only reversed much of the damage […]
Just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, so one cannot help giggling that a Chinese inventor with a small team and modest resources has by his open source DeepSeek AI system outsmarted the behemoth “geniuses” that came up with the $500 […]