A poll last week showed that 71% of Americans don’t want Congress to raise the debt ceiling from its current $14.3 trillion, a level that the total of outstanding debt is expected to hit in March. According to conventional pundits, this is extraordinarily irresponsible, leading to a U.S. default on its outstanding debt. Yet as […]

Goldman Sachs’ $2 billion deal for Facebook, valuing the social networking site at $50 billion, combines the worst elements of the 1997-2000 and 2004-07 bubbles. It sets a grossly excessive valuation on an Internet company with modest revenues and prospects. It also involves an investment bank structuring a complex deal to maximize its own fees, […]

The French sale of an advanced helicopter carrier with all the latest equipment to Russia announced last week is yet another indication that not only are the old Cold War certainties gone, but so are the assumptions of the benign U.S.-centric “globalized” world of 1991-2010. The new multi-polar world order that seems to be emerging […]

The Census Bureau issued the first results of the 2010 Census this week, showing that the U.S. growth in population in 2000-2010 was only 9.7%, the lowest decennial growth since the 1930s and the second lowest on record. This has modest if beneficial effects on our understanding of where the United States is today. However […]

At this season of goodwill, my thoughts immediately turn to that unsung hero Ebenezer Scrooge, and this year, in view of the subject’s topicality, to his possible thoughts on today’s major economic policy problem of tax reform and budget deficit reduction. One thing immediately springs to mind: he would wish to eliminate the income tax […]

The insouciant approach which President Obama and the US budget negotiators have taken to the federal deficit, adding around $900 billion to deficits over the next two years with no countervailing spending cuts, has been greeted by a sharp rise in Treasury bond yields. This brings into focus a very delicate question: at what point […]

The EU bailout of Ireland and its previous bailout for Greece, when examined closely, bore a distressing resemblance to the 2008 U.S. bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup. The authorities poured more resources into assets that had been shown to be defective, without sufficiently enforcing the painful purging and liquidation that was necessary. By […]

Germany’s success in 2010 has surprised most U.S. analysts, who tend to start every sentence about Europe with “sclerotic.” However it is by no means the only country which is recovering from the Great Recession in a remarkably healthy fashion. China, Chile and Singapore are also stand-outs in this respect, while the United States, Ireland […]

Global opposition to Ben Bernanke’s policy, World Bank president Robert Zoellick’s “trial balloon” and statements by some of the new Republican Congressional caucus have caused a modest revival in consideration of the Gold Standard. In my view, the chances of its revival by official means in the next ten years remain infinitesimal, but there is […]

As long-term U.S. interest rates rise and negative global reactions roll in to the Fed’s announcement November 3 of a further $600 billion round of “quantitative easing” purchases of Treasury bonds to the inquiring mind one question becomes uppermost: Even though there’s a huge amount of competition for this title, is it indeed possible that […]