The world economy has come a very long way from the small-government, unregulated free-market model so celebrated by Adam Smith and other classical economists. Today, even in countries that claim to be committed to capitalism, taxes, monetary policy, regulations and state spending have produced huge distortions. To illustrate how huge, I thought I would compare […]

W. Edwards Deming (1900-93) was the statisticians and management consultant, famous for visiting Japan after World War II and introducing them to many elements of the superb Japanese management and production system. Nearly thirty years after his death, with Japan deeply unfashionable, he may appear to have little to teach us. However, when I examined […]

Lord & Taylor’s bankruptcy this week closely followed on that of Brooks Brothers. That suggests a common trend, a Götterdämmerung of the preppie WASP. Certainly, other factors, the COVID-19 lockdowns and the ineptitude of private equity, played a role also. But there is an overall zeitgeist at work, social as well as economic, and it […]

As gold finally broke through its 2011 all-time high the mainstream media played the story down as much as possible. No surprise there. However, gold’s surge in 2020, which shows no sign of ending, strongly suggests that the era of dozy Keynesians monetary policies is finally reaching its inevitable Götterdämmerung. The Fed having proved over […]

Governments all over the world have in the last four months indulged in a blowout of spending, financed by central banks’ monetary stimulus and zero or negative interest rates. They are currently planning further orgies of spending, even though their economies are mostly re-opening. This will lead them down a path of budget deficits and […]

The Holy Roman Empire was a pioneer in banking through the Fuggers, it had adequate constitutional protections for at least the middle classes, and it benefited from fabulous German engineering talent, so why didn’t it get the Industrial Revolution? Its main problem was internal tariffs; we are told that in the 18th Century there were […]

Four months after the Chinese-origin coronavirus impinged in a big way on our lives, it is finally becoming clear that it is not going away, and that the world will have to take account of it and its future cousins for many years to come. Accordingly, the world economy and life in general will suffer […]

Following the discovery of fraud at the German payments processor Wirecard, the media are asking how German regulators can be so clueless. That is the wrong question. If anybody can make regulation work Germans, precise, efficient, un-corrupt and indomitable can do so. So, the problem must be, not that German regulators are inept, but that […]

An Oxford-Said Business School study this week demonstrated that private equity returns have not been higher than public equity returns over the lengthy period since 2006. Similar studies have shown that hedge fund returns, theoretically not correlated to equity returns, have also grown increasingly inferior. Since both types of investment have created new billionaires from […]