The lengthy government shutdown of October-November 2025 suggests that the U.S. constitutional structure is faulty – no sensible system could possibly be designed for such frequent failure. Yet in its early decades, both before and after the dark cloud of slavery was forcibly removed, the system worked quite well – children were brought up on […]

This week, the Bear’s Lair column celebrates its Silver Jubilee. The first column appeared mid-afternoon on Election Day 2000, predicting a massive market slump (this is a Bearish column, after all!) and an electoral wipeout in 2004 for the then unknown winner of the 2000 presidential election. The full 25 years of columns can now […]

The news recently that the 1,400-foot pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue is facing severe structural issues because the architect used the wrong kind of concrete causes one to question yet again the joys of big city living. Apartments in that building go for $30 million or so, for which you could buy a very […]

Gold’s rapid price rise through $4,000 illustrates the collapse of conventional fiat currencies. Rather than look at gold’s rise, you should consider the dollar’s fall, with $1,000 dropping from 1 ounce of gold as recently as 2016 to 0.24 ounces today. Other fiat currencies have behaved similarly to that 76% decline over the last decade. […]

Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned […]

Free trade economists are very fond of quoting David Ricardo’s (1772-1823) principle of Comparative Advantage, first expounded in his “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” in 1817. Ricardo was one of our greatest economists, but his principle of Comparative Advantage, like much of modern mathematical economics, rested on shaky assumptions and thus had […]

President Trump’s announcement last week that the fee for H1B visa applicants would rise to $100,000 should be welcomed. The much-abused and abusive temporary worker H1B, H2A, and H2B visa programs, greatly expanded by the late unlamented President George H.W. Bush, have been artificially wrecking the living standards of ordinary Americans for decades. This is […]

The collapse of Tricolor, a $1bn subprime private credit lender making loans to those without Social Security numbers, is a rather small canary in a very large coal mine: the $3 trillion private credit industry. That industry has been fueled by “funny money” credit availability and represents a poisoning of the existing global credit system, […]

President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is […]

President Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has caused anguished squawking about the loss of Fed independence. Yet experience since 1998 has shown that Bank of England independence has produced worse outcomes than before, and the world’s independent central banks’ overall performance has been thoroughly third-rate. Central bank independence without firm policy guidelines […]