Many supporters of Donald Trump have expressed nostalgia for the 1950s, when large companies, strong unions and international competition that had been bombed flat guaranteed well-paid blue-collar jobs. Yet the current situation looks nothing like the 1950s. With robots, genetic engineering, self-driving vehicles, serious emerging market competition and debt defaults on the horizon, we are […]

Large organizations are almost never innovators. You can quote the occasional exception, such as the Manhattan Project, but even in space exploration the ability of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, on a tiny budget, to outdistance NASA in rocket design, shows that big is generally intellectually barren. Throughout history, the periods of greatest innovation have coincided with […]

The White House’s 2019 Budget is pure fantasy, but it assumes a deficit in the year to October 2019 of $984 billion. However, Congress’s 2-year Budget deal has added at least $80 billion more spending, pushing the deficit well over $1 trillion. Since we are at the top of a business cycle, with unemployment around […]

Theresa May’s negotiations for Britain’s exit from the European Union are not going well. Time and again, she has been forced to back down, notably over an outrageous EU demand for 40 billion pounds of exit money. Since that demand, negotiations have grown no easier, as the EU has attempted to impose further outrageous conditions, […]

The announcement last week that Chinese researchers had cloned monkeys represents slow progress – it is now nearly 22 years since British researchers produced Dolly the cloned sheep. However, that delay is largely due to obstructive Western regulation, and the time taken for emerging market China to catch up to the intellectual frontier of a […]

Britain’s Labour Party has now committed to re-nationalizing many of the utilities that were privatized to such fanfare under Lady Thatcher in the 1980s. Reluctantly, we should admit that in certain respects, the Labour Party has a point; monopolies owned by private equity groups, as have appeared in the water industry, offer no accountability to […]

Rarely can two economists of such eminence have been made to look foolish so quickly. In 2015, Robert J. Gordon wrote a book proclaiming that the lousy productivity growth that we had seen in recent years was the best we could expect, and in January 2016 Paul Krugman reviewed it enthusiastically in the New York […]

According to a Fed report this week, U.S. consumer credit increased $28 billion in November, the largest rise in 16 years, with credit card debt rising at annual rate of 13.3%. This is of course a sign of consumer confidence, another sign that President Trump’s administration has revolutionized the U.S. economic outlook. However, it is […]

2018 looks to be a jolly year; it has the potential for no less than four kinds of financial disaster: a major “fringe market” crash in crypto-currencies with credit implications, a stock market crash of the old-fashioned kind, a massive bond market crash as yields return to reality and a recession, which Trump-haters no doubt […]

Governments and large institutions are becoming increasingly negative on the crypto-currency markets, as they grow to significance within the overall world economy. Yet crypto-currencies are only the tip of the iceberg. Even as modern communications technology has enabled governments to snoop, pry and punish with unprecedented efficiency, so it has brought new means for individuals […]