Month: August 2026

The Bear’s Lair: Canada – the living standards lemming

For nine years from 2006 to 2015, Canada was better managed than the United States. Its prime minister Stephen Harper, if too diffident and compromising for my taste, was notably more intelligent and economically capable than either U.S. President of the period, George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Its GDP growth matched that in the […]

The Bear’s Lair: Deflating the Financial Engineering Bubble

The decade of ultra-low-interest-rate Bernankeism in the 2010s, which produced ziggurats of misguided investment, has left a huge amount of overhang in the worldwide debt markets, which must at some stage deflate and be written off. Big-city real estate and tech stocks form a large part of this overhang. However, the largest element, most dangerous […]

The Bear’s Lair: When should governments invest?

The announcement that the US Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital is lending $400 million to the Australian scandium miner Sunrise Energy Metals is just one of a series of government investment deals that have caused globalist observers to question the Trump Administration’s commitment to the free market. Yet as history has repeatedly shown, governments […]

The Bear’s Lair: Time to get serious about the Budget

Looking at the Monthly Treasury Statement for June, it is clear that the U.S. budget deficit for the year to September 2026 will again be above $2 trillion, once again over 6% of Gross Domestic Product. The fault is mostly on the revenue side, where last July’s Big Beautiful Bill gave away some $150 billion […]

The Bear’s Lair: GDP should include Housewives, not Government

Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product statistics, worked for the public sector for the greater part of his career. It is therefore not surprising that government output is included in GDP at its full cost, however useless or indeed damaging the activity undertaken by the bureaucrats concerned. Conversely, Kuznets […]