Since the middle 1990s, investors and entrepreneurs have focused almost solely on the youth market, generating endless devices and amusements for youth. Many of these (smartphones, for example) older people can use only with difficulty, because of limited eyesight or coordination. This has been demographically foolish and has increasingly stymied economic growth. The real opportunity, […]

Prime Minister Liz Truss’s £150 billion subsidy to energy consumers is yet another economically foolish policy, of a type that have been regrettably predominant since Lord Liverpool left office in 1827. For a country where previously sound policies had produced the Industrial Revolution, Britain has developed a remarkable propensity to shoot itself in the foot […]

Edward Chancellor’s admirable “The Price of Time” (Allen Lane, 2022) demonstrates clearly that interest rates are a matter of time preference; lenders charge interest because $1 today is worth more than $1 in say two years’ time. That is all very well, but at present, with markets heading downwards, interest rates heading upwards and interest […]

President Biden’s lax immigration policy has one inescapable economic effect: it lowers the earnings of low-skill Americans. Conversely, the policy of the 1620s and 1630s that shipped convicts and the indigent to the American colonies as indentured servants had a remarkable positive effect in reversing the hundred-year decline in real English wages. The recent failure […]

U.S. non-farm labor productivity declined at a 4.6% annual rate in the second quarter of 2022, following a 7.4% decline in the first quarter. Although predictable from the expansive employment numbers and the declining GDP, this is shocking news, which the media have largely ignored. There also seems little likelihood of a near-term reversal. Like […]

The Financial Times this week had a lengthy piece “When the tech boom met reality” detailing how truly galactic levels of venture capital funding have produced little innovation and are now leading to truly galactic levels of losses. It is now clear that the “all point in one direction and throw money at it” approach […]

The 0.9% decline in U.S. second quarter GDP Thursday brought an immediate denial from the Biden administration that the United States was in a recession, following similar denials that inflation was persistent and that high oil prices were due to restrictions on U.S. pumping. As this column has frequently forecast, the 2020s will be a […]

Goldman Sachs’ (NYSE:GS) second quarter income falling 47% with threats of job cuts is just the beginning of a major downtrend in investment banking, reversing the surge of 1982-2021. This should not be a surprise: it has happened three times before. The most recent occasion was after the 1968 stock bubble; that crash was short. […]

June’s unemployment figures showing growth of 372,000 jobs were hailed as unambiguously good news by the media and the markets. However, there is a problem: advance estimates of second quarter GDP, to be announced at the end of this month, suggest a decline of 1.5% at an annual rate, similar to that in first quarter […]

The last six months have shown that the absurdly loose Fed policy and benign monetary conditions have gone – the 39-year bull market in bonds (1982-2021) is over. Inflation will not disappear soon, and the Fed will not raise rates far enough to control it, but the next decade or more will inevitably see a […]