The Martin Hutchinson Place
This week, we learned that a hedge fund and the credit default swap (CDS) market had pushed a regional telecom company, Windstream Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:WIN) into bankruptcy. The toxic CDS product caused havoc in 2008, and regulators have been their usual ineffectual selves in failing to grasp it since. There is no legal way to […]
Senator Marco Rubio (R.-FL.) is not a favorite of this column – he is much too fond of open-borders projects and his child tax credit was a waste of government money. But his latest idea, a tax on stock buybacks, looks well designed to remove most of this plague on U.S. corporate finance and the […]
This column has contended for several years, based on empirical data observations from several countries, that low interest rates worldwide were killing productivity growth. A University of Chicago paper finally provides some academic back-up for this contention and suggests a mechanism through which it takes place. There are other mechanisms also, and I would suggest […]
The OECD recently published a paper on taxation and economic development that claimed that the propensity of poor countries to tax less than rich ones is a contributor to their poverty. Thus, by raising taxes to Western levels, they could develop their economies. This view is not surprising from an organization of international bureaucrats, but […]
It appears increasingly likely that the British people will be forced into a “People’s Vote” re-running the Brexit referendum of 2016. For those of us around during the Cold War the term “People’s Vote” has a familiar ring, similar to the “People’s Republics” and People’s Democracies” of Communist tyranny. This therefore begs the question: is […]
There are many reasons why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain in 1775-1850, but among the most important is the quality of economic thought among British policymakers of that period. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo gave them an excellent grounding in free market economics, and few statesmen of that period opposed their doctrines. […]
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed last week that there was plenty of money for his pet projects, but it was “in the wrong hands.” In response, the Wall Street Journal, supposedly the voice of capitalism, gave a turgid list of rich New Yorkers’ charitable donations while blasting the inefficiencies of de Blasio’s administration. […]
As I write, the key vote on Theresa May’s quasi-Brexit deal with the EU is set for January 15. This column has previously advocated voting for May’s deal on the grounds that it offers the most certain progress towards Brexit, but the European Commission has booby-trapped it, so that there is a chance of Britain […]
Thomas Friedman’s 2005 best-seller “The world is flat” asserted that we were moving inexorably towards globalization and that barriers to trade and people movement were disappearing, as would many aspects of sovereignty. It is now clear that this process produces a political reaction, in which ordinary people protest vehemently against the flattening of their planet. […]
It has been a bad December for the stock markets, but pundits across the land are predicting a recovery in the new year from this terrible drop. Short-term market fluctuations are unpredictable, but the reality remains: owing to decades of funny money the market has got far ahead of its equilibrium value, which is now […]