The disappearance of the Bitcoin trading website Mt. Gox caused consternation among younger libertarians, who had seen crypto-currencies like Bitcoin as a vital weapon in the struggle against Big Government. For those like myself with almost as much suspicion of the tech sector as I have of Washington, it caused a smile of grim satisfaction. […]

Larry Summers, writing in the Financial Times last week, deplored the recent progression by the United States towards a “Downton Abbey economy” of extreme inequality. In fact, his criticism was in one respect ill founded: in terms of inequality, measured by a statistic such as the Gini coefficient, the United States is already close to […]

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget projections, released last week, estimated that 2.5 million people would leave the job market as a result of Obamacare. Immediately the two political sides engaged in verbal bickering, with Republicans saying the program would cause 2.5 million to lose their jobs, while Democrats claimed that 2.5 million people choosing […]

Last year made bears, emerging market investors, value investors and precious metals investors feel fools. The market went up continually, rising by over 30%, while stock values became ever more extended and precious metals prices headed steadily downhill in spite of an unparalleled orgy of money printing by the world’s central banks. This year, market […]

MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new book “The Second Machine Age” (Norton, 2014) look at recent advances in machine capability and suggest that we are going through a second Industrial Revolution, with robots soon capable of taking over massive new areas of human activity. Their picture of a world with ubiquitous […]

The World Economic Forum last week issued its “Global Risks 2014” annual report, supposedly outlining the risks that could cause real trouble in the next decade. A lot of it was fashionable pap – for example, even if global warming is real, it doesn’t have time to get up much momentum or do much real […]

Policymakers and investors have been remarkably sanguine in the first few weeks of the year, appearing to believe that the problems bedeviling the global economy since 2008 are being alleviated, and that the solutions produced for those problems will not themselves produce further and worse pathologies. Yet in one area that confidence seems ill-conceived, that […]

As we head towards the fifth anniversary of the current bull market in March, fundamentalist investors may be feeling a little aggrieved. Certainly in the last year, if they bought stocks on the principles pioneered by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd in their 1940 classic “Security Analysis” they are likely to have underperformed the Standard […]

The Democrat playbook for 2014, we are told, intends to focus on U.S. inequality, and to suggest that only redistributive taxation will solve it or even alleviate it. Certainly it’s possible to reduce inequality through punitive levels of taxation – at the cost of making everybody poorer. I thus though it worthwhile to disentangle the […]

Since 2008 there has been a huge tightening of bank regulation, attempting to prevent a repeat of the meltdown. Capital requirements have been greatly increased, although a number of the regulatory loopholes in the previous system have been left open. However not enough attention has been paid to the interaction between the new regulatory standards […]