We are coming up next year on the quarter-millenary of the Ayr Bank crash of 1772 and last year we had the 300th anniversary of the 1720 South Sea Bubble. When looking at these 18th Century disasters I am reminded again and again that the financiers’ failures were very similar to those of 2007-08, or those that are being perpetrated now. Given the advances of human civilization since the 18th Century, financiers’ inability to learn from history, find better techniques or maintain competent risk management is truly remarkable. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: Davos and China offer the same grim destiny
The World Economic Forum, sponsor of the annual Davos meeting, proposes a “Great Reset” of the capitalist system. The People’s Republic of China nominally adheres to the Communism of its founder, Chairman Mao Ze-dong. Yet in practice, the societies each advocates bear a remarkable similarity to each other and share two overriding characteristics: they are not regimes under which any free man would want to live, and their prescriptions will lead to increasing poverty in the long term. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: They did plague recovery better in 1350
John Martin’s Fall of Nineveh 1829
Source: むーたんじょ
We are now slowly emerging from the scourge of Covid-19 and the main change in our economic management has been a massive surge in state spending, together with a call for a “Great Reset” to erode our freedoms further. It is therefore worth examining the emergence from two previous celebrated English outbreaks of plague, in 1348-49 and 1665, to see what they did differently. After doing so, one is forced to the conclusion that Middle Ages and Early Modern governments had more sense than we do. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: Land of a thousand banks
Around 1760, the English banking system, which had been concentrated in London, sprouted a plethora of country banks in provincial towns, over 800 by 1813, That produced a unique financial environment, in which both expertise and money were readily available locally for new projects throughout provincial England and Wales. This greatly facilitated the Industrial Revolution, but should we replicate it today, and if so, how? Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: Gosplan economic approach doing real damage
A new McKinsey’s report, featured in the Financial Times, shows that over the past 25 years, the dominance of large companies has increased, as has the share of capital returns in the economy, while wage levels have risen far less than productivity. The FT’s solution to this is more state meddling, with redistributive policies to move income from large corporations to poor individuals.
I would suggest that the solution is the opposite: give up the state meddling of the last 25 years, most particularly the Gosplan approach to setting the prices of key inputs. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: Serfs do better after pandemics
The Black Death of 1348 was a gigantic human tragedy, but for most of those involved and their descendants, it had one enormous silver lining: serfs’ rights and living standards soared to previously undreamed-of levels in the following 150 years, as labor shortages took hold. As we emerge from a similar albeit thankfully less severe pandemic, an equivalent rise in living standards is unlikely. Nevertheless, for the “serfs” employed by large companies in big cities, there may be some upside. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: One-party governance kills economic progress
The United States is currently in a situation where, after a short and beleaguered period of partial opposition control, one party controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, the media and the tech sector. We have seen such dominance before in Britain: in the Whig Supremacy of 1714-62 where with Royal support Britain became a one-party state; the Industrial Revolution was thereby delayed by half a century. We should examine the structural reasons why this happened and their applicability to our day. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: We are re-running 1973-74
Although it represented my youth, I am by no means nostalgic for 1973-74. In Britain, it gave us a banking crash, the 3-day week, the lead-up to 25% inflation and the most left-wing Labour government Britain ever had. In the United States, it gave us the nullification of 1972’s landslide election victory, a resurgence in commodity inflation, a Presidential resignation and “Whip Inflation Now” buttons. Globally it gave us the 1973 oil crisis, the first major crack in Western political/economic hegemony. I had hoped we had left that period behind forever, but alas we seem fated to repeat it, albeit with different details. Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: How can we de-corporatize?
The 25-year asset bubble has caused a crescendo of corporatism, as large corporations, their values swollen by asset price inflation, have sought to impose themselves on our lives. Their interaction with the left of politics has been especially poisonous, with “corporate-woke” schemes generated by top management threatening to eliminate the interests of the shareholders who are nominally their masters. Is this our future, or will we find a way to defeat it? Continue reading
The Bear’s Lair: After Globalization
As predicted in these columns a decade ago, globalization did not work, and has now gone the way of the dinosaur. It is not however clear what will replace it. The international institutions are still there, exerting their influence like stegosauri who missed the memo about the end of the Jurassic. Western “woke” governments are planning ever more elaborate schemes to combat climate change. That suggests that, to succeed, a country needs to be both well-run and isolated from international advice. Continue reading