“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington” caroled Noel Coward in an inspired 1947 piece of career advice. The McKinsey Global Institute study “The Emerging Global Labor Market” presented at the Institute for International Economics Wednesday by the Institute’s Director Diana Farrell leads unquestionably to new advice for the Worthington family (if they […]

Discussion following Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement has centered on her potential successor’s views on abortion and wrongful imprisonment, the two areas in which the Angry Left is most hostile to the George W. Bush administration. Yet in reality there is a much more crucial question from the right: what is that successor’s […]

Richard Scrushy walked scot fee from the near collapse of Health South, while Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom and John Rigas of Adelphia have received or will receive prison sentences of well over a decade for their crimes. 1990’s Business’s combination of lack of ethical scruples, excessive rewards and excessive penalties for […]

The late unlamented Senator Reed Smoot (R.-UT) was spiritually in full flow at the New America Foundation’s Forum on America’s Economic Future Wednesday, as Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, ex-Senator Tom Daschle (D.-SD) and Senators Richard Durbin (D.-IL) and Byron Dorgan (D.-ND) competed as to who could say the nastiest things about China. Presumably trade policy […]

Signs have multiplied recently that all is not well in the overworked, overpaid world of Wall Street. The Chairman of Morgan Stanley has been forced out, quarterly earnings are coming in generally down, and both JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup have been zapped with $2 billion legal settlements for misguided corporate finance work. Are these […]

“Three billion new capitalists,” a new book by Clyde Prestowitz, head of the Economic Strategy Institute, highlights the potential rewards and dangers to the U.S. economy inherent in the full emergence of India and China’s 2.5 billion people (and the former Soviet bloc’s 500 million) onto the world’s economic stage. Old patterns are dissolving, old […]

Richard Fischer, president of the Dallas Fed, caused rejoicing in the markets and doubtless several thousand more speculative house purchases Tuesday by suggesting that the Fed’s tightening cycle was “in its eighth inning.” One is again forced to conclude that central bank policy in a democratic fiat money system inevitably tends towards inflation and the […]

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 […]

At the time the Euro was introduced in 1999, its opponents prophesied a dark future of increasing currency strains within the euro zone, as disparate economies struggled together in a single currency. Later, in 2002-03, the fears appeared to have been ill-founded, and the euro was hailed as a stunning success. However, today it seems […]

Professor George Ayittey of American University presented his new book “Africa Unchained” at the Cato Institute last week, which demonstrates that Africa’s problems primarily result from that continent’s appalling political leadership. This view hasn’t been widely enough vented, and may provide the germ of a solution. I would however add a rider: the West is […]