The Martin Hutchinson Place
In discussing modern American, British or global politics, I often find myself on a different planet from other commentators, because my preferred political system is not that of any modern polity, but that of Britain under Lord Liverpool’s government from 1812 to 1827. Most of the policies were better in that government’s earlier years, but […]
JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon recently expressed a preference for Kevin Warsh over Kevin Hassett as the next Fed Chairman, on the grounds that Warsh is less likely to be influenced by President Trump’s calls for rate cuts. To one who has followed bankers for several decades (and been one in the distant past) […]
Britain, the EU and Canada have instituted regimes of “thought police” where police departments randomly arrest those “guilty” of politically incorrect social media postings. They have also in recent years suffered economic growth rates far below their historic norms, which have produced a yawning gap between their living standards and those of the by no […]
For decades now, techno-optimists have been prattling about a “Singularity” that will immeasurably increase the growth rate in human productivity and thereby living standards. This Singularity may either come through Artificial Intelligence, as it outpaces the human brain and begins to make its own technological advances, or through other technologies that combine to produce a […]
Ronald Reagan was a pretty good President but like all of us not perfect. Probably his greatest blunder, like Margaret Thatcher’s and without her excuse of facing an unexpected end to her rule, lay in not securing a successor who would follow his principles. The Presidency of George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), whose break with […]
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 […]
The news recently that the 1,400-foot pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue is facing severe structural issues because the architect used the wrong kind of concrete causes one to question yet again the joys of big city living. Apartments in that building go for $30 million or so, for which you could buy a very […]