The leading environmentalist Lester Brown, at the New America Foundation Thursday, provided a new take on our environmental dangers that’s worth careful consideration for one reason: uniquely from an environmentalist in my experience, the short term danger is more salient than the long term one.

Speculation has begun on the successor to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, due to leave office when his 14 year term as Federal Reserve Board member ends in January 2006. Whoever his successor, he won’t have Greenspan’s enormous credibility with the markets, so monetary policy will never be the same. This is probably a good […]

According to economist David Ricardo, if the public sector deficit increases sharply, private saving can be expected to increase commensurately, thus ensuring that the capital is supplied to fund the deficit. Since total U.S. saving in 2003, public, corporate and private, was a mere 2 percent of gross domestic product, this doesn’t seem to have […]

Everybody appears to agree that the federal budget deficit, in this fiscal year approaching $500 billion, is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but not yet an urgent one. After November’s election, of course, the urgency of the problem will become fully apparent. It’s therefore with asking, with considerable trepidation, what solutions might […]

Stock prices remain well below the peaks of 2000, yet top management compensation keeps rising. Since the overall economy’s performance since 2000 has been at best mediocre, it’s worth asking what fuels this inexorable climb.

“Gentlemen prefer bonds” responded Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon when asked his opinion of investing in the 1920s stock market bubble. Well not today they don’t, if they’ve got any sense.

May import prices for the United States, announced Thursday, were up 1.6 percent over April. While that’s a freak number caused by the oil price spike, the overall truth remains: the inflation monster, asleep twenty years, is stirring back into life. The consequences of its revival will be dire.

With oil prices touching $42 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, many economic commentators have gone into denial, pointing out the many reasons why they can be expected to relapse again to the $30-35 range. Yet there is an alternative scenario, in which supply disruption causes oil prices to rise much further, and […]

David Rubenstein, chief executive of the Carlyle Group, outlined Tuesday at an Economic Club of Washington dinner the history and current operations of Carlyle, claimed by Rubenstein to be the United States’ largest private equity company, with $18 billion in asset value under management. Carlyle’s history brings closely into focus a disturbing trend in the […]

“In my Father’s house are many mansions” says the Bible (John, 14:2). I always thought that description made Heaven sound like an American suburb, rather overdeveloped in a building boom. This time around, though, many of those mansions are going to be empty.