President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is […]

President Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has caused anguished squawking about the loss of Fed independence. Yet experience since 1998 has shown that Bank of England independence has produced worse outcomes than before, and the world’s independent central banks’ overall performance has been thoroughly third-rate. Central bank independence without firm policy guidelines […]

President Trump’s decision to take a 10% share stake in Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) as part of the deal for the Biden administration’s excessive handouts to a failing company was arguably a good one. However, the original CHIPS Act was economically damaging while suggestions by NEC Chairman Kevin Hassett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that there might […]

It is a long-standing view of the Left, for which there is a depressingly large amount of evidence, that the tide of History heads in only one direction — towards an authoritarian socialism that might as well be Communism. Less than three years ago I believed that in Latin America at least, authoritarian socialism had […]

When looking at industrialization in Austria-Hungary, I was struck by how little its governments used the superb “Austrian School” cadre of economists its universities were then producing – surely results could have been better than the sluggish bureaucratized industrialization the country actually achieved. Yet other societies, notably 18th and early 19th Century Britain, used their […]

President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer attracted much criticism, as government statistical agencies are claimed to be impartial. Such claims of impartiality should always be regarded with deep suspicion, as they generally conceal a noxious political agenda. When you look at the BLS’s statistical methods, its agenda becomes apparent. […]

President Donald Trump’s tariff agreements with the EU, Japan and other countries have changed the economics of world trade; they have also revolutionized global politics. Far from the “New World Order” trumpeted by such Marxist-globalists as Klaus Schwab, late of the World Economic Forum, we are now returning to a much healthier late-19th century existence, […]

In Japan’s recent Upper House elections, the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition under Shigeru Ishiba lost its majority (barely) but a more striking result was the success of the populist-right Sanseito party, which won 14 new seats in the Upper House. Like its German cousin AfD, Sanseito proposes a sensible mix of policies including strong opposition to […]

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2008, it was not a scam but a very ingenious, potentially useful new invention, largely because of the “blockchain” by which transactions could be recorded in permanent form. When I spent six months in late 2017 recommending crypto-currencies for an investment service (very successfully, being fortunate indeed in my […]

Wall Street trading titan Jane Street was last week banned from trading in India, having made a $5.2 billion profit from options trading apparently mostly at the expense of Indian retail investors, according to a Financial Times report. Jane Street, a trading house with $20.5 billion of net trading revenues in 2024, is an extreme […]