The U.S. Congress is being asked to give President Barack Obama full “fast track” negotiating authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership, supposedly a free trade agreement with 11 other mostly wealthy Pacific nations. Yet when you examine the Wiki-leaked version of TPP which is all we have, it is far more notable for the draconian […]

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all” wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1919. He also made the point that there are frequent periods when those gods appear to be asleep. There are a number of copybook headings that sensible policymakers consistently followed before 2008, which have systematically been ignored since. They are […]

Fifty years ago, we all knew what home life would be like in the 21st Century – the Jetsons (admittedly set in 2062) showed us that it would include robot maids taking away the drudgery of cleaning, cooking and dishes. Yet somehow that future never arrived, or at least it hasn’t yet. I would suggest […]

Without being too cynical, the proposed U.S.-Iran treaty seems unlikely to extinguish Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the long run. I would argue that Iran is less dangerous than is believed by the neocon community – with Pakistan and North Korea in the mix, it probably ranks only third among risks of nuclear outbreak. However that […]

The government and the main opposition party in the British election due on May 7 have agreed to promise no increases in the two basic rates of income tax, nor in the rate of Value Added Tax. Thus 75% of British tax capacity has been ruled off limits. This does not however mean that either […]

Lee Kuan Yew, who died last week, led Singapore from an impoverished tropical island when he took over in 1959 to a country with a GDP per capita 50% higher than the United States’ today. Obituaries have been divided into two camps: those praising the economic progress Singapore has made and those decrying the elements […]

When the NASDAQ Composite share index last week touched 5,000, its level at the top of the 2000 tech bubble, sober commentators everywhere including the head of NASDAQ intoned that things were different from 2000 and the market was not in anything like so much of a bubble. They were right. Things are very different […]

There are times when it’s good to be young – the 1960s, with its prosperity and hedonism, were one such. Being old has fewer joys, but you can argue that the 1990s were a halcyon period for the old, when pension funds were swollen by stock appreciation and the senior citizen generation was relatively small. […]

The Indian budget on February 28 slackened the much needed effort to move that country’s fisc towards balance in order to spend more on infrastructure. It was accordingly much praised by the Keynesian media worldwide. While the Lord knows infrastructure is much needed in impoverished India, and its cost there is presumably not as bloated […]

Janet Yellen’s testimony to Congress this week, in which she indicated that inflation needed to be heading above 2% before the Fed made even the smallest shift in its zero interest rate policy, indicated that Maynard Keynes’ favored policy of the euthanasia of the rentier has been all too enthusiastically carried out. The rentier is […]