The last week in Washington has been consumed by negotiations about avoiding a debt default as no doubt will be the week to come. On all sides we are told how irresponsible and disastrous it would be to allow the United States to default on its debt obligations. That’s quite correct: it would be irresponsible […]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its new report on global warming on September 30, which was duly played up by the world’s media. Actually, if you read it carefully, it represented a considerable backing off from the previous report, released in 2007. It has now become clear that, not only has global warming […]

After an initial spot of trouble with the banks and General Motors, the 2008-09 recession has not been particularly painful in terms of corporate and governmental defaults. Recently Detroit defaulted in the largest municipal bankruptcy since the Great Depression, but Detroit has always seemed a special case. However the signs are growing that as U.S. […]

We live in a world in which international agencies have proliferated, both in the political and economic spheres. Economically, the World Bank and the IMF are paramount, and then there are the G8 group of leading advanced economies, the G20 group which accounts for some 85% of global GDP and other attendees at the G20 […]

Five years after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the U.S. economy was in deep trouble, but beginning to enjoy a vigorous recovery from the depths of a very unpleasant depression. The rest of the world, on the other hand, with the notable exception of Britain, was mired in Depression and in several cases Fascism. This […]

You can argue that Ronald Coase, who died this week, was a greater economist than Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman or Maynard Keynes (in descending order of competence). The Coase Theorem, propounded in his 1960 “The problem of social cost” is one of the most important rationales for distrusting state regulation, and preferring the tax […]

The Environmental Protection Agency has been pouring regulatory glue into the U.S. economy since 1973. The trial bar has also been pouring litigation glue into the U.S. economy for a similar period, and their colleagues in the New York financial bar have equally been adding to the sticky stuff with documentation glue (as a former […]

Egypt’s crisis may appear to exemplify the bad ways of the past, with an authoritarian military regime vying for power with a fanatical religious sect. However that analysis doesn’t explain why the country had previously existed for hundreds of years in reasonable contentment – as well as, millennia earlier, producing the first of the world’s […]

Emerging market stocks have underperformed the U.S. market by some 35% in 2013. That’s because investors, remembering the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, believe emerging markets will be zapped badly when money tightens. But that belief may be wrong; many emerging markets have pursued more responsible policies than rich countries since the 2008-9 recession and […]

Bloomberg BusinessWeek a few weeks ago ran a vulgar but highly apposite cover, in which a hedge fund’s claimed return pointed sharply upwards from a frat-boy fund manager’s abdomen while its actual return drooped feebly to the floor. Very clever, if uncouth. However Business Week covers are notorious contrary indicators, like that of 1979 headlining […]