The capitalist system works best when willing buyers meet willing sellers and a free-market price is negotiated. In the real world of today, this market mechanism is imperfect. It falls down when governments get involved, with their unlimited funding from taxpayers. It also falls down if huge funds appear with their management’s incentives tied to […]

Fed Chairman-designate Kevin Warsh suffered through his congressional hearings this week and is due to take up his post on May 16, after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s term ends. With his objective of “keeping the Fed in its lane” there is much structural reform he can undertake to remove the Fed from meddling in non-monetary […]

The Iran War has now extended beyond the 4-6 weeks that President Trump originally projected, so the “tail risks” of prolonged war become ever more apparent. Those risks are fairly small at this stage, but as the war continues, its out-of-pocket costs will increase arithmetically, but its economic and fiscal downside risks will increase geometrically. […]

President Trump’s proposed Budget for the year to September 2027 includes $1.5 trillion for defense, up from $1 trillion in the current year. Even on its face, this would produce a dangerous widening of a U.S. budget deficit that is already 6% of GDP. However, defense spending involves an additional risk that the enthusiasts who […]

The Socialist re-election in Paris, accompanied by pictures of a garbage-strewn historic colonnade on the ultra-chic Rue de Rivoli, suggests that big city governance is plunging further into Stygian depths yet unplumbed. Others of the world’s major cities suffer from the same problems, notably London and New York but also Los Angeles and Berlin. This […]

In the summer of 1914, all the world’s major economies were quite well run by governments that understood the benefits of industrialization and free markets. There were also no major ideological conflicts — the two most ideologically extreme countries, the socialist democracy of France and the still quasi-feudal autocracy of Russia were locked in a […]

Paul Ehrlich, the biologist and environmentalist who died last week, in 1968 wrote “The Population Bomb” forecasting mass starvation by the 1980s if global population, then 3.4 billion, was not brought under control. He has since been much mocked by anti-environmentalists, who point out correctly that global population has since soared to 8.3 billion, yet […]

The global economic distortions caused by China’s state-driven economic model are becoming more severe. China’s investment has been raised to economically unprecedented levels and the country has embarked on a manic subsidized export drive to keep its GDP growth rate around 5%. That policy is reaching its limits, both through uncollectible debt in the economy […]

President Trump’s military campaign against Iran raises a most urgent question: what kind of successor regime is possible, and how will that regime attain legitimacy? Only with a legitimate, economically rational regime can Iran prosper, yet the triple temptations of Islamism, authoritarian socialism and hopeless government corruption may well seduce an inexperienced electorate into error, […]

Around a third of U.S. equities are now owned by index funds or by institutions mimicking index funds and the percentage so owned is steadily rising – passively owned institutional equities recently overtook those actively managed. This is a negation of capitalism; if investors are not making rational decisions about their investments, the market’s sorting […]