In 1982-2000, I avoided large losses by completely ignoring gold as an investment vehicle — I started thinking about it again when in July 2000 I noticed that Vanguard’s precious metals fund was its only loser over the preceding 5 years. Since 2008, I have invested consistently in gold mining stocks, and enjoyed good years […]

The outstanding winners from the 1991-2016 policies of globalization were dwellers in poor countries. With international sourcing much cheaper and easier and foreign investment flows soaring, well-run poor countries could attract capital, jobs and export-producing industries in profusion, producing revenues that could educate their workforce and hugely raise their living standards. For poor countries, the […]

December 12’s U.K. election is essentially a referendum on Brexit, with much of the population fearing its outcome. The post-Brexit future is unclear. However, we can say more about the past than the future, even a past depending on an event that did not happen, since most other variables are known. Hence it is worthwhile […]

In an earlier column, I reflected gloomily on the terminal debt crash that the world is likely to suffer around 2040, and on the possibility that productivity growth is slowly disappearing. If those hypotheses are true – and I would not claim them as more than probable — then we will return in our economic […]

A new paper reports that the Bitcoin bubble of 2017-18, when the price of that cryptocurrency reached $20,000, was fueled by “funny money” creation in its sister coin Tether. That is hardly surprising, the cryptocurrency universe, where all values are artificial, is bound to be subject to scams and bubbles. However, it throws a lurid […]

Assuming Britain finally manages to edge its way out of the EU, it will look for other affiliations. The obvious one is with the core Anglosphere of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. At first sight, this looks like a model driven by mere nostalgia. Not so: the governance of the Anglosphere […]

The Western world approaches the 2020s at the top of a boom, with asset prices and leverage at all-time highs and interest rates at all time lows, yet with living standards mostly disappointing expectations. The extreme policies that have produced this position are unsustainable over another decade, even if we were mad enough to try. […]

Since the early 1990s, we have been living in the George Soros Dream World. Interest rates have been very low, encouraging leverage, raising asset prices and making billionaires richer. Meanwhile, the world economy has become ever more global, moving towards the global one-party state Soros favors and impoverishing the working-class, modestly educated, locally-oriented folk the […]

Conventional wisdom holds that treaties represent countries getting together peacefully to advance humanity’s goals, while tariffs represent dog-eats-dog negative-sum competition that can provoke wars. Yet treaties, being complex and negotiated in secret, are mostly the work of rent-seeking bureaucrats, whereas the competition of tariffs provides international relations with valuable grit, preventing countries from conspiring together […]

The failure of the WeWork IPO and the poor post-issue performance of Uber and Lyft have called into question the current Silicon Valley fashion for multi-billion-dollar capitalizations of “Unicorns” that make heavy losses and remain privately owned. Maybe throwing endless pools of money at unproven intellectually shaky concepts doesn’t work. When Unicorns go the way […]