India’s rejection of prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reminds one in its ingratitude of Britain’s rejection of Winston Churchill in 1945. Like Margaret Thatcher’s ouster in 1990, it imposes a heavy brake on the pace of economic reform. Yet unlike the departure of Arthur, Duke of Wellington in 1830, it does not represent the irreversible […]

“La Grande Bouffe” (Blow Out), the cult 1970s French film in which a group of Beautiful People ate themselves to death on French food with occasional breaks for sex, may have its analogy this year in the forthcoming Google share issue, expected to value the company at $25 billion. The production values are wonderful, the […]

Phillip Longman, author of “The empty cradle” (Perseus Books, 2004) is worried by declining birth rates worldwide, but particularly in the United States. His problem isn’t really a problem, but one particular variant on his solution could have other uses.

“The Awakening Conscience,” William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of 1848, shows the effect on a young girl of the dawning realization that she has “ruined her life” by allowing herself to be seduced by a smooth guy with a mauve velvet jacket. The picture could well be re-used in today’s U.S. economy, with Federal Reserve […]

Jim Rogers, famed Wall Street investor, thinks commodities are in a 10-15 year up-cycle. While Rogers is in certain respects cuckoo, he may be right on this one.

“I have seen the future, and it works” wrote Lincoln Steffens, fatuously, after his visit to the newly Soviet Russia. Today, if you want to see the future working you should look at Japan, which demographically and in terms of the business cycle is where we will be a decade from now.

For sheer chutzpah, Intel chief executive officer Craig Barrett’s Wednesday piece in the Wall Street Journal, explaining why he opposed expensing stock options, took some beating. The following day, it was revealed that Barrett himself doubled his allocation of stock options in 2003, presumably on the principle of “Get it while you can.”

The Copacabana Pact sounds vaguely enjoyable, but is in reality a major threat to the world’s financial system. President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and President Luis Ignacio (Lula) da Silva of Brazil agreed earlier this month to coordinate their debt negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. Creditors of the world, beware!

The correct response, when your superior requests you to stop doing something that harms their interests, is “Yes, SIR, Sorry, SIR,” preferably accompanied by a smart salute. Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina seems to have omitted this essential piece of Marine Corps training.

The argument over globalization has a tired quality to it, with primitive protectionists battling against dogmatic free traders, who cite the doctrine of comparative advantage and correctly term their opponents economically illiterate. Yet true economic understanding, not simply of the theory but of the second order effects that trade can produce, may not lie entirely […]