A new paper reports that the Bitcoin bubble of 2017-18, when the price of that cryptocurrency reached $20,000, was fueled by “funny money” creation in its sister coin Tether. That is hardly surprising, the cryptocurrency universe, where all values are artificial, is bound to be subject to scams and bubbles. However, it throws a lurid […]

Assuming Britain finally manages to edge its way out of the EU, it will look for other affiliations. The obvious one is with the core Anglosphere of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. At first sight, this looks like a model driven by mere nostalgia. Not so: the governance of the Anglosphere […]

The Western world approaches the 2020s at the top of a boom, with asset prices and leverage at all-time highs and interest rates at all time lows, yet with living standards mostly disappointing expectations. The extreme policies that have produced this position are unsustainable over another decade, even if we were mad enough to try. […]

Since the early 1990s, we have been living in the George Soros Dream World. Interest rates have been very low, encouraging leverage, raising asset prices and making billionaires richer. Meanwhile, the world economy has become ever more global, moving towards the global one-party state Soros favors and impoverishing the working-class, modestly educated, locally-oriented folk the […]

Conventional wisdom holds that treaties represent countries getting together peacefully to advance humanity’s goals, while tariffs represent dog-eats-dog negative-sum competition that can provoke wars. Yet treaties, being complex and negotiated in secret, are mostly the work of rent-seeking bureaucrats, whereas the competition of tariffs provides international relations with valuable grit, preventing countries from conspiring together […]

The failure of the WeWork IPO and the poor post-issue performance of Uber and Lyft have called into question the current Silicon Valley fashion for multi-billion-dollar capitalizations of “Unicorns” that make heavy losses and remain privately owned. Maybe throwing endless pools of money at unproven intellectually shaky concepts doesn’t work. When Unicorns go the way […]

After a decade of ultra-low interest rates, we have become used to ultra-high asset prices – in big city real estate, stocks, bonds, tech start-ups, art and collectibles, and pretty well everything else you can think of. It is too depressing to think of the damage that will be done by the inevitable bursting of […]

By a vote of 298 to 56 on September 4 and a second similar vote on September 9, the House of Commons voted to approve an election on October 15, yet because of a supermajority provision unknown to the British constitution, Parliament was not dissolved. A Parliament you cannot dissolve is no longer a democratic […]

We seem doomed to another round of monetary “stimulus” from the Fed and the European Central Bank, at a time when real interest rates are already substantially negative. This has caused crazy leverage all over the global economy, with such madness as Boeing (NYSE:BA) in a highly cyclical business, operating entirely without stockholders’ equity. Very […]

Former prime ministers Tony Blair and John Major, of opposite British political parties, have united in wishing to nullify the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. This well illustrates the unpleasant tendency for politicians to find commonality and unity in thwarting the wishes of their electorates. Within individual countries, the strength of this tendency […]