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 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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Trump administration’s policies must run a gauntlet of lunatic left-wing judges before they can be implemented. Infrastructure of every type in the U.S. faces huge additional costs, with its real cost ten times what it was a century ago and three times that of similar infrastructure elsewhere. Mergers can be delayed for years, to […]

President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would impose tolls on the Straits of Hormuz shocked the usual suspects but makes perfect sense (I hope he re-reverses his subsequent reversal). U.S. taxpayers have been billed for three idiotic Middle East wars in the past 25 years, and this one is only prolonged because of the Straits’ […]

The election of non-Marxist Presidents in Peru and Colombia (provided they are allowed to take office) reinforces a remarkably upbeat series of election results in Latin America. Cumulatively, those results give the whole continent a new hope of success, alas with the notable exceptions of Mexico and Brazil, still mired in hard-leftism. The question I […]

The Socialist/Communist advance in last week’s New York primary elections confirms that the U.S. political system is systematically rigged against good policy and sound economics. Two reforms are needed: a property franchise, to ensure that those without a stake in the economy cannot vote themselves handouts, and an end to the tax benefits for charities […]

A new paper by Robert J. Gordon and Kenneth Ryu “The Mysterious Disappearance of Productivity Growth in US Manufacturing: Was It the China Shock?” shows that annual U.S. manufacturing productivity growth collapsed on a price-adjusted basis from an average of 5.1% in 1987-2005 to 1.6% in 2005-23, due to the outsourcing mania, mostly to China, […]