The Martin Hutchinson Place
Recent reports suggest that the Venezuelan economy has enjoyed a modest uptick after its collapse due to its following Presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro’s Communist economic policies from 1998-2018. Russia and China also have benefited, not from a move to democracy, but from a move from Communism to Kleptocracy. The lesson is clear: a […]
“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a 0.400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate anybody,” said James Carville at the start of Bill Clinton’s Presidency in 1993. Since that time, the […]
What if the Munich Agreement of 1938 had worked? I was led to this speculation by watching a wonderful British movie “Q Planes” made in that year in which British technology reigned supreme and there was no sign of any Great Depression. (With Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, it’s well worth catching up with!) But […]
The Federal government’s rental evictions moratorium has now been extended until March 31, and there is every prospect it will be extended further. This yet again weakens the property rights of landlords, eroded steadily since World War II. With shareholders also attacked by the ESG movement and interest rates going negative in many countries, no […]
“Bros” connecting through the social media forum “WallStreetBets” last week staged a massive rally in the shares of GameStop (NYSE:GME) causing huge losses to a hedge fund that had shorted the stock. Most commentary suggested this should be a rare occurrence, as the hedge fund was a professional investor performing a valuable market function, while […]
Helen Andrews’ book “Boomers” is a beautifully written indictment of the Boomer generation, similar to Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians,” by a Millennial social conservative who believes the Boomers broke U.S. social mores. On the economic side, it is also clear that somebody destroyed sound economic thinking but much less clear who did it – Maynard […]
President Joe Biden’s economic program is becoming fairly clear and as expected it imposes severe costs on the U.S. economy. There are however also some positive nuggets, which we should welcome and hope to keep for better times ahead. Even with those nuggets, however, the economic outlook is grim, largely because of policies on which […]
The Twitter and Facebook bans on President Trump and the Apple, Google and Amazon bans of Parler certainly intensify one’s dislike of those tech sector giants. Yet beyond dislike, there is a question to be answered: is it possible that, despite their astronomical stock market valuations, they may reduce the overall economic value of global […]
I have just been researching the politics, ideas and economics of the Restoration period. While political differences were enormous and at times lethal – between outright “Leveller” republicans and followers of Sir Robert Filmer’s “Patriarcha” who believed in absolute monarchy — it was scientifically and economically as creative and entrepreneurial a period as Britain has […]
My address book of friends living in California, some of them rich, has in 2020 gone from double digits to zero. Even within the economically doom-ridden United States, California’s outlook is especially grim, with “Bearmageddon” due in five years rather than ten. Yet there is an avenue of escape: the state must be split into […]