While oil prices have been volatile in 2014, stock prices haven’t. The U.S. stock market has continued the gradual upward move it began in 2009, while the VIX volatility index peaked very briefly in October at 31, far below the level of almost 90 touched in 2008. Politics has been turbulent, and the oil price […]

In 2012, Robert Gordon postulated the thesis that innovation was slowing to a halt, so that we should not expect to continue getting the productivity gains we had enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries. He propounded four “headwinds” that were causing this: demographics, education, debt and inequality. At the time he wrote, this column […]

The market rejoiced on December 5 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 300,000 new U.S. jobs had been created. The general consensus is that the 3.9% third quarter U.S. GDP growth is the harbinger of a brighter trend – the Economist’s team of forecasters has U.S. growth at 3% in 2015, up from […]

The OPEC meeting at Thanksgiving failed to agree on any oil production cuts, sending oil prices down an immediate $5 per barrel. Their action made it clear that, for the first time since 1972, there is no cartel able to control the oil market. At first sight, that looks like excellent news for America’s consumers, […]

The U.S. economy enjoyed an especially attractive 1990s, with middle-class wages even increasing substantially, because of the Peace Dividend that followed the Cold War’s ending. Regrettably at present the U.S. and its allies appear to be facing a combination of threats combining the worst of the 1980s with the worst of the 2000s. In that […]

After an unexpected decline in the country’s third quarter GDP, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called an early election last week, while postponing implementation of a sales tax rise into 2017. The global media were generally laudatory, explaining how he could extend his program of indeterminate “reform” while stimulating the economy further by means of […]

One of the courses I did at business school was “Analysis of Financial Reports” where we learned to deconstruct all the scam accounts that had proliferated in the late 1960s boom – most of which companies, undone by negative cash flow, went bust after 1970. We were informed by the professor that the Financial Accounting […]

Japan caused a euphoric rise in global stock markets last week by raising the cap on its “quantitative easing” purchases of government bonds to 80 trillion yen a year ($720 billion, some 14% of Japan’s GDP.) Yet even with the huge “stimulus” and the declining yen to which it has led, Japan can still barely […]

The average earnings of U.S. men with only a high school diploma between 25 and 34 have fallen 25% since 1979, according to Census Bureau data. Admittedly women in the same category have done better – but their earnings have still fallen. Given that GDP per capita has risen 73% in real terms since 1979 […]

All bubbles burst eventually. Google has become a bigger political donor that Goldman Sachs. The tech sector is no longer the naïve capitalist entity that was startled by the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit in 1998. Venture capital money has flowed profusely into it for half a decade and valuations have reached to the sky. Some of […]