Much commentary this year has been devoted to the dramatically negative effect which the “sequester” spending cuts would have on U.S. Gross Domestic Product. In Japan, one leg of prime minister Shinzo Abe’s three-part plan to revive the economy is additional state spending, predicted to increase GDP in spite of its damaging effects on Japan’s […]

The stock markets of the world spiral up to infinity with only an occasional hiccup and the U.S. housing market is well into bubble mode again, pumped up by cheap money. Only gold and silver languish, hard assets that have gone out of fashion because of the lack of inflation. At some time this bubble […]

Mike Judge’s 2006 movie masterpiece “Idiocracy” painted a future in which differential fertility between the middle classes and the underclass in 500 years produced a U.S. population of knuckle-dragging intelligence, allied to a popular culture whose debasement had reached its ultimate destination. Meanwhile, with the first successful cloning of a human embryo by the Oregon […]

In an essay “Nietzsche’s marginal children” in The Nation this week, Corey Robin takes the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek to task, claiming that he replaced the ordinary consumer as driver of the economy by the ultra-rich, so that we are all subjected to the whims of financial Nietzschean supermen. I’ve always found Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy […]

The choice of Brazil’s Roberto Azevedo to lead the World Trade Organization, over the reported opposition of both the EU and the United States, is an indication that protectionism, which had appeared thankfully quiescent in the early years of the current recession, is now a major global danger.  Since a renewed downturn is inevitable when […]

The brouhaha about the spreadsheet error in Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s 2010 paper “Growth in a time of debt” brings home an important economic truth. Not that Reinhart and Rogoff were in error; their overall conclusion is clearly true, not to say obvious, and correction of the error in their spreadsheet merely softened the […]

The wolves are closing in on the world’s bank secrecy laws. Former bank employees in Switzerland and Liechtenstein have handed lists of depositors to the U.S. and EU authorities. Following the Cyprus debacle, the EU is seeking to end bank secrecy in the well-run banking systems of its members Luxembourg and Austria. Luxembourg appears to […]

According to the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, senior advisors to Germany’s Chancellor Merkel are pushing for a wealth tax, to be applied to citizens of those weak sister Eurozone members forced to undergo bailouts from German taxpayers. You might think that, having criticized sternly the malefactions of the super-rich, and of the economic and political […]

Silicon Valley billionaires and near-billionaires are attempting to influence public opinion on the immigration issue, with a $50 million Political Action Committee. Their employees should consider whether their interests would be served by organizing in a truly aggressive isolationist union, like the 1950s United Auto Workers. After all, if the world market for computer scientists […]

Increasing inequality is bemoaned by the left worldwide, with the Financial Times’ Edward Luce doubtless making President Obama choke on his cornflakes by claiming that “US inequality will define the Obama era.” Yet contrary to the left’s fond belief, the increasing inequality and the crass behavior of the super-rich are responses, not to inadequate levels […]