The Martin Hutchinson Place
Two groups of people from elite backgrounds, Boston merchants of the early 19th century and Stanford professorate alumni of the early 21st century, founded institutions that made important changes to the U.S. financial system. Yet the financial institution founded by the Boston merchants played an important stabilizing and constructive role, while that founded by Stanford […]
Janan Ganesh, in a recent Financial Times column, described Britain as “Europe’s haven from the hard right.” In doing so, he crystallized why the last 13 years have been ones of gentle, increasingly annoying decline. In all Western societies, policy is bedeviled by a kind of creeping “woke” socialism representing the centrist consensus; that brings […]
Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog made famous by the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, died recently at the age of 18 – a good run for even a famous dog. Dogecoin itself is far from its April 2021 market capitalization of $50 billion, although its current $8.8 billion ranks it a very respectable ninth on the cryptocurrency league […]
Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, burned Londinium to the ground in AD 61 – we can still find a layer of oxidized iron in the geological record attesting to her success. While Londinium was not a big city by modern standards – its population was probably about the same as today’s Poughkeepsie, with the same […]
Javier Milei, a libertarian economist favored to win next month’s Argentine election, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson last week. After proclaiming his adherence to Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, Milei announced that there should be no public sector layoffs initially, instead allowing the economy to recover before laid-off bureaucrats had to seek work. Bad […]
The current U.S. and British education systems are increasingly dysfunctional. Far too high a percentage of the population has been bullied into attending college, with very little benefit in most cases and with costs that have escalated several times faster than inflation or even incomes. The faculty and administration of top colleges are increasingly isolated […]
President Trump has proposed a universal 10% tariff on U.S. imports and has been met by universal derision among professional economists. Not so fast! High tariffs were a feature of Republican governance before the Great Depression. While they operated on a “beggar my neighbor” basis against the British steel industry, for example, they have retained […]
At the end of 2019, the Standard and Poor’s 500 index of U.S. share prices stood at 3221.29. Since then, the United States has been subjected to a devastating epidemic, has wasted trillions of dollars in response to that epidemic, driving its debt to GDP ratio up to 108%, has suffered debilitating inflation that has […]
Jason Furman, in the Wall Street Journal, is just the latest former senior financial official (Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, 2013-17) to suggest the Fed should raise its inflation target above the current 2%. We know what these people want – a target high enough that rates can be reduced to zero again, […]
In 1830, Britain was completely economically dominant, the only significant industrial power. Since that time, it has steadily lost its industrial dominance and that relative decline, while to an extent inevitable, was hurried along by a grossly malign approach to policy which persists today. Unless it is reversed, further accelerating decline is ahead.