The great Montagu Norman (Bank of England Governor, 1920-46) said when considering Britain’s return to the Gold Standard in 1925 “the merchant, manufacturer, workman, etc, should be considered, but not consulted any more than about the design of a battleship.” It’s quite clear that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke shares Norman’s view. He consults closely with […]

Recent economic data have caused economic commentators to begin wondering whether the U.S. economy is heading into a “double-dip,” prolonging the period in which employment and output run far below potential. Once again, this raises parallels with the 1929 crash, which led to a Great Depression that in the United States was only ended by […]

In the endless negotiations about Greece’s approach to bankruptcy, EU leaders suggested last week that a “fund of experts” might take over $200 billion or more worth of Greek state assets, with a view to speeding their privatization and repaying much of Greece’s staggering debt load. The idea has some merit, as it reverses the […]

My apologies, first, for the hiatus in columns last week – I was moving from Vienna, VA., a suburb of Washington DC to Poughkeepsie NY, a semi-suburb (it’s 73 miles away) of New York. Many have clearly regarded this as an eccentric choice, and much of the motivation stems from things like hating the Washington […]

A few weeks ago, I compared Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to the Weimar Republic central banker Rudolf von Havenstein. The comparison looks even better after the Fed’s non-performance April 27 and the markets’ subsequent response. Even the more cautious members of the general media are beginning to compare the current outlook to that of the […]

The publicity surrounding the “Atlas Shrugged” movie got me to thinking again about the central premise in the book. For those who have not read it, Ayn Rand’s book postulates that all the entrepreneurs and people of great ability withdraw their services from the U.S. economy, retreating to an undiscovered mountain valley in the Rockies […]

The philosopher Friedrich Hegel propounded the triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis as one of the major logical processes by which knowledge gets advanced. We are now seeing its operation in the global energy market. From the thesis of a free-market energy menu consisting largely of fossil fuel energy sources and an antithesis of a highly […]

The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report, released Wednesday, said global financial stability had improved in the last six months. They must be the only people who think so. In reality, the U.S. budget deficit has widened in spite of the economic recovery, the financial services sector is undertaking ever more preposterous deals, storing up trouble […]

The news that Portugal has requested a bailout from the EU is hardly surprising. The outgoing socialist government, having wrecked the economy and emptied the government coffers, wants to tie down its center-right successor, due to be elected June 5. Similarly, when later this year Spain finds itself in similar or worse trouble and approaching […]

Multifactor productivity data, announced to little fanfare last week, showed a sharp downward revision for 2008-09, with a net fall over the two years. The quinquennium 2005-09 had the lowest average multifactor productivity growth of any quinquennium since 1978-82, at a beggarly 0.2% per annum.. Lovers of the current economic order like to trumpet the […]