The Martin Hutchinson Place
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 […]
Recent U.S. employment figures have seen a rise in the native-born workforce, a decline in the immigrant workforce and a rise in real wages. Some companies seem to have noticed – Home Depot’s $5.5 billion acquisition of the building supply contractor GMS indicates a move towards the contractor market, whose distribution pattern is less labor-intensive […]
I am currently a modest shareholder in Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (NYSE:NAK) a company sitting on a huge copper/gold deposit on the south coast of Alaska that has been stymied from developing it for half a decade through Federal environmental holdups – an incredible waste of resources. Yet mergers that agglomerate businesses into ever larger […]
As Israel starts a war with Iran, and the U.S. considers how deeply involved it wants to get, one lesson from history is abundantly clear. Wars cost hugely in direct physical devastation, yes, but they also have a huge hidden economic cost, in distorting the market and encouraging policymakers to seize further power and narrow […]
When you look at the arc of global industrial progress and the emergence of new technology, one decade stands out: the 1880s. That decade saw the arrival of electric light and power, which revolutionized everyone’s lives. It also saw the automobile, the safety bicycle, the first process for large-scale aluminum production, the Hollerith tabulating machine, […]
President Trump has proposed to privatize the two housing finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now in public ownership after their collapse in 2008. While the fisc might benefit in the short term from such a deal, the risk to taxpayers of a second collapse and bailout is high, for risk correlation reasons I […]
President Trump’s threat to remove Harvard’s ability to take international students is appropriate. The university has admitted far too many dozy offspring of the Chinese Politburo and has allowed intellectual standards to collapse into a morass of woke incoherence. The first sign of sharp decline, as far back as 2006, was the university’s firing of […]
In research for my forthcoming book on global industrialization, I have been examining recently the career of the Japanese business titan Eiichi Shibusawa (1840-1931). Shibusawa, still something of a national hero in Japan, was effective head of the Dai-Ichi Bank from its founding in 1873 until 1917. More important, having while working for the Ministry […]
President Trump this week described the EU as “in many ways nastier than China.” The media responded with the usual shrieks of outrage, but he had a point. The EU bureaucracy has imposed a structure on Europe that is perpetually Socialist, deeply anti-democratic and utterly intolerant of dissent. Traditionally, the EU benefited from being democratic […]