It now looks as if 2011 will see a definitive showdown in which the Ben Bernanke Fed and its allies in sloppy monetary policy worldwide are finally forced to face up to the damage caused by their depredations. The new $600 billion round of “quantitative easing” by the Fed and the almost simultaneous Republican capture […]

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “Bear’s Lair” column. The first such column appeared on November 6, 2000, the eve of the Presidential election, with the headline “Dow crashes, Bush/Gore stunned in polls.” Its central thesis was that whoever won the election the following day would be a one-term President because of the […]

The foreclosure crisis has highlighted again a major flaw of our modern economy: the fragility of ownership and property rights in the Internet age. Quite apart from the possibility of an EMP field blanking out everybody’s servers, the sheer complexity of computer-managed structures such as securitization can make them very difficult if not impossible to […]

The Fed led by fearless Ben Bernanke has made it clear that since deflation is a significant risk and bank lending is depressed, it intends to help the banking system further by up to $1 trillion in further bond purchases. The rational investor’s response to this was clear all last week: sell banks, whose assets […]

Brazilian minister of finance Guido Mantega last week accused the major economies of starting “currency wars”. To a large extent he was trying to divert attention from his own overspending misdeeds. However this week’s decision by the Bank of Japan to enter more “quantitative easing” and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s aggressive response to the EU/US […]

With Brazil’s election apparently a big victory for the leftist candidate Dilma Roussef, Russia facing increasing political and economic uncertainty, India in the grip of spiraling inflation and even China’s growth prospects seeming dimmer, the great growth story of the last decade is acquiring a few dents. For the first time, it is reasonable to […]

Gordon Gekko isn’t the only jailbird 1980s financier to make a comeback this year. The junk bond market, largely the brainchild of Drexel Burnham’s Michael Milken, is set to have a record year. The difference between the two: Gekko’s financing strategies were sounder. It is now possible to identify the next bubble being blown and […]

As higher education costs escalate faster than inflation, while the global job market remains largely depressed, increasing numbers of commentators are questioning the value of higher education as a whole. The question becomes more urgent, as state budgets become increasingly burdened by higher education’s further expansion. However the answer to the question of education’s value […]

The appointment of trader/investment banker Bob Diamond to head Barclays Bank last week renewed calls for government to force a split between banking and investment banking, while in retaliation Barclays threatened to relocate its headquarters abroad. To most commentators, that seemed an overwhelming danger, but I was forced to wonder: if the behemoth “investment banking” […]

One of the great myths that sustained the late twentieth century economy was that of exponential growth. Technological change was supposed to be moving ever faster, and so economic growth would naturally also be exponential, making us all richer than our parents and immeasurably richer than our grandparents. Since 2000, this seems to have gone […]