The Martin Hutchinson Place
As gold finally broke through its 2011 all-time high the mainstream media played the story down as much as possible. No surprise there. However, gold’s surge in 2020, which shows no sign of ending, strongly suggests that the era of dozy Keynesians monetary policies is finally reaching its inevitable Götterdämmerung. The Fed having proved over […]
One of John Maynard Keynes’ favorite conceits, expressed in Chapter 12 of his 1936 “General Theory” was that selecting stocks was like a beauty contest in which you selected the six most attractive faces from a panel of 100 photographs – the person who agreed most exactly with the consensus winning a prize. For once, […]
Governments all over the world have in the last four months indulged in a blowout of spending, financed by central banks’ monetary stimulus and zero or negative interest rates. They are currently planning further orgies of spending, even though their economies are mostly re-opening. This will lead them down a path of budget deficits and […]
The Holy Roman Empire was a pioneer in banking through the Fuggers, it had adequate constitutional protections for at least the middle classes, and it benefited from fabulous German engineering talent, so why didn’t it get the Industrial Revolution? Its main problem was internal tariffs; we are told that in the 18th Century there were […]
Four months after the Chinese-origin coronavirus impinged in a big way on our lives, it is finally becoming clear that it is not going away, and that the world will have to take account of it and its future cousins for many years to come. Accordingly, the world economy and life in general will suffer […]
Following the discovery of fraud at the German payments processor Wirecard, the media are asking how German regulators can be so clueless. That is the wrong question. If anybody can make regulation work Germans, precise, efficient, un-corrupt and indomitable can do so. So, the problem must be, not that German regulators are inept, but that […]
An Oxford-Said Business School study this week demonstrated that private equity returns have not been higher than public equity returns over the lengthy period since 2006. Similar studies have shown that hedge fund returns, theoretically not correlated to equity returns, have also grown increasingly inferior. Since both types of investment have created new billionaires from […]
There has been a cry among the college-educated left this week to “defund the police.” For normal citizens, especially those living in big cities, that is a terrible idea – the crime rates of the 1970s and 1980s are not something they want to return to. However, it is clear that much of the unhappiness […]
We have heard a great deal about excessive inequality in the United States, which has among other things been used to justify the recent rioting. Historical comparisons however show that inequality is not especially high by the standards of the past, though it has certainly risen over the last thirty years. Yet the solution to […]
Governments and central banks worldwide have responded to the Covid-19 epidemic by massive doses of monetary and fiscal stimulus. Little of the money thrown at the problem has done any good. However, the further economic distortions governments have caused will have one long-term effect: they will delay and enfeeble recovery. Ever since 1929, government actions […]