Communication and mutual understanding with both allies and opponents are key to a successful foreign policy. The skillful alliance formation and peacemaking of Klemens, Prince von Metternich and Robert, Viscount Castlereagh after the Napoleonic Wars led to a century of peace and rapidly increasing prosperity; the lack of it in 1914 and the late 1930s […]

Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL) is bringing out yet another virtual reality headset, the “Vision Pro” to appear early next year, priced at $3,400. This follows the total failure of Meta’s (Nasdaq:META) Metaverse and similar virtual and augmented reality products launched by Alphabet (Nasdaq:GOOG), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and others – I bought my son a $30 virtual reality headset […]

The past two decades have been wonderful for the luxury goods business as demonstrated by the position at the top of the world’s billionaire Rich List of Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton. Cheap money has boosted asset prices ad infinitum and the top 1-2% of the world’s population with significant inflated-value […]

President Biden appears adamant that he will not yield one iota to the Republicans demanding spending cuts in return for increasing the debt limit. He also claims to believe that through the 14th Amendment he can issue debt unilaterally, without Congressional approval. By doing so, he would take the position of an absolute monarch, like […]

Nonfarm labor productivity in the United States dropped at an annual rate of 2.7% in the first quarter of 2023, which followed a fall of 1.6% for 2022 as a whole. This does not appear to be a temporary phenomenon, or rather it appears coincident with the hyper-regulating Biden administration. Since productivity growth is key […]

The TV pundit Tucker Carlson, fired by Fox, is now seeking a new gig, but appears to be hampered by non-compete clauses in his agreement with Fox, which extends to December 2024. As the columnist Frank Miele of RealClearPolitics has suggested, one way around this would be for Carlson to run for President, which would […]

The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, all within six weeks, are a drastic failure of both bank regulation and Fed monetary policy. This column has written incessantly about the idiocies of Fed monetary policy and its GOSPLAN approach to interest rate setting; I would now like to focus on […]

The coronation of King Charles III next Saturday is planned to be on a smaller scale than that of his mother Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That is appropriate; Elizabeth’s coronation may have taken place in a relatively poor country still living under the effects of postwar rationing, but it was graced with an immensely […]

Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton is currently the world’s richest man, worth around $239 billion; he is notable in coming neither from the United States nor from the tech sector. His wealth is a product of globalization, which has produced demand for Western fashion brands among a substantial fraction of 8 billion […]

Saudi Arabia recently signed a contract with China to sell oil with payment in yuan (China’s currency, sometimes known as renminbi, for inscrutable Chinese reasons). Argentina and Brazil are proposing to use a common currency, the sur, for trade between them. India and Russia are undertaking trade in rupees and rubles. This is a gathering […]