The Martin Hutchinson Place
It’s an interesting term – risk management. It sounds so organized and reassuring. A risk that is managed is tamed, brought within well understood parameters and reduced to a level that shareholders can tolerate. Investment bankers and their tame economists constantly tell us that the derivatives market has reduced risk in the financial system and […]
The collapse of the Doha round of trade talks in July raised fears that the world might be about to descend into 1930s style autarky, with a huge negative effect on prosperity. Unless things get very much worse, that’s unlikely in trade as a whole, if only because the historical memory of the 1930s remains […]
Successive meetings on oil at the American Enterprise Institute Wednesday and on the world’s monetary system at the Cato Institute Thursday brought the current problems with the world economy sharply into focus. There’s far too much money currently sloshing around the world, and not nearly enough oil. The combination of the two will make for […]
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan referred this week to “froth” in the U.S. housing market; others have debated whether it is a “bubble” at least on the two coasts. Whether froth or bubble, the secular rise in house prices over the last 5 years has made long term changes in American life, most of them for […]
In his campaigns for President, Ross Perot used to talk about a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. manufacturing jobs moving overseas. From a Korn Ferry/New America Foundation symposium Wednesday on U.S. manufacturing’s decline, the sound can still be heard. It would appear however that the fault may lie in our own actions — thus the […]
Next Monday, March 10, is three years from the peak in the U.S. stock market, March 10, 2000, when the Nasdaq composite index closed at 5,048.62. In bear market terms, this is a very long time. Three years from the September 1929 peak, the stock market had already touched its nadir, in June 1932 (at […]
Even in the outbreak of pessimism about the economy last week, few have touched on the effect of a prolonged bear market recession on employment patterns. Since this is a matter of huge importance to most of us, particularly young people entering the workforce and seeking a career path, I thought it worthwhile, starting from […]
William Hogarth’s 1747 classic “The Industrious Apprentice and the Idle Apprentice” may be about to demonstrate its continued pedagogical strength in the international economy, where Japan and the United States have enjoyed contrasting fates for a decade.
The economic news in the last several weeks has been almost uniformly positive. The commentary from our competitors has been even more so, tending to dismiss as laughable the possibility that the recovery may be only temporary, that a “double dip” recession may occur. Consequently one is driven to ask: Are we in a bear […]
My esteemed colleague at United Press International, Ian Campbell, wrote in a recent “GlobalView” column that he believed oil prices would trend down over the next several months, dropping to about $17 a barrel.