A year ago, I wrote about the worrying increase in leverage among America’s blue chips caused by share repurchases (“Hollowed-out blue chips are the next subprime, November 13, 2017). Today I wanted to return to the subject, because the travails of GE (NYSE:GE) are a reliable advance signal of the trouble ahead for the large […]

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the world’s greatest avoidable tragedy, the Great War of 1914-18. In terms of human welfare, we would all have been immensely better off if that war had never been fought, with the benefits extending through the intervening decades even to today. Economically, however, the scale […]

Since this column appears on the 413th anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, I thought it worth reflecting on why he got so close. The principal reason was the parlous state of early Stuart finances, which was due to two factors: the lack of a central bank and the […]

The Sears bankruptcy, and the Schumpeteran creative destruction in the shopping mall sector that will follow, feels like it has been coming for a long time – and it has. Ever since the Fed went off track from sound monetary policy in February 1995, ultra-low interest rates have created new unproductive investment and postponed necessary […]

It is a well-known economic principle, the central thesis of Adam Smith’s work, that competition between individual businesses produces better outcomes, while monopolies and oligopolies result in inefficiency and conspiracies against consumers’ interests. From the economic principles involved, the same is also true of governments. We should thus welcome nationalism and deplore both movements towards […]

In many areas, such as monetary policy, the U.S. Supreme Court, corporate Boards of Directors and Cabinet government, decisions are made by arriving at a group consensus. If the group is sufficiently intellectually diverse, this works well. There is however a pernicious danger, which we have seen in action many times in economic policy, where […]

The last two decades of low interest rates have seen a vast increase in the world’s stock of assets, measured at market value, largely matched by a corresponding increase in debt. However, the increase has not raised global productivity growth, which has slowed as the asset glut has increased. This points to a core economic […]

Ever since this column started in 2000, I have been writing that British house property is hopelessly overpriced. There is no question this has been spectacularly bad investment advice – Londoners who owned a home in 2000 have at least trebled their money since then, doubling it in real terms. Nevertheless, it is possible for […]

As President Trump imposes tariffs on China and elsewhere, much dark muttering is heard from the media and conventional economists about Smoot-Hawley and the 1930s. They are too gloomy. Two factors have changed since the 1930s: bloated government and the invention of computers, and their combination means that the Victorian dream of universal free trade […]

Learning the right lessons from financial crises is tough. The 1929 stock market crash was blamed for all the ills of the Great Depression that succeeded it and led to two decades of regulation and socialism. In 1720, the British tried to stop all new company formations while the French gave up on finance altogether […]