Ronald Reagan was a pretty good President but like all of us not perfect. Probably his greatest blunder, like Margaret Thatcher’s and without her excuse of facing an unexpected end to her rule, lay in not securing a successor who would follow his principles. The Presidency of George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), whose break with Reagan was signaled by his slimy 1988 Convention Acceptance Speech invocation of a “kinder, gentler America” was economically a disaster; his son’s (Bush 43) subsequent Presidency was just as bad. We are still paying the price of their misdeeds and will continue to do so for decades yet. Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal this week defended executive compensation by citing the case of Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart (NYSE:WMT) since 2014, who in the year to January 31, 2025 earned $27.4 million. With a good track record in a company with $681 billion in revenues and 2.1 million employees worldwide, that amount was reasonable in today’s market. However, over $20 million of McMillon’s pay came in stock awards, providing McMillon incentives to goose Walmart’s stock price artificially. This indeed appears to have happened, since Walmart’s stock price was up 310% during his tenure, while its revenues were up only 40%, only a tick above the period’s 36% inflation. This, combined with Elon Musk’s extreme pay award at Tesla, suggests we must return to first principles and redesign CEO compensation to make capitalism work better. Continue reading →

The Federal Reserve at its October 28-29 meeting announced that it would stop reducing the size of its balance sheet and instead begin a renewed “quantitative easing” buying bonds from the market. In other words, the central bank will once again finance the government’s budget deficit, a flagrant violation of Monetary Policy 101. As I will show below, this will have immensely damaging long-term economic effects, further agglomerating and bureaucratizing the corporate sector. It will also allow the central bank to “Liz Truss” the government, forcing a market meltdown, every time the government tries to implement better policies. President Trump needs to find new Fed leadership that will reverse this nonsense. Continue reading →

The lengthy government shutdown of October-November 2025 suggests that the U.S. constitutional structure is faulty – no sensible system could possibly be designed for such frequent failure. Yet in its early decades, both before and after the dark cloud of slavery was forcibly removed, the system worked quite well – children were brought up on the speeches of the “Famous Five” most eminent Senators selected in 1957, the last two of whom, Robert LaFollette (1855-1925, Senator, 1906-25) and Robert Taft (1889-1953, Senator, 1939-53), served well into the twentieth century. The system went wrong somewhere. When you look carefully, it becomes obvious that one brief period of multiple “reforms” was responsible: the early 1970s. Continue reading →

This week, the Bear’s Lair column celebrates its Silver Jubilee. The first column appeared mid-afternoon on Election Day 2000, predicting a massive market slump (this is a Bearish column, after all!) and an electoral wipeout in 2004 for the then unknown winner of the 2000 presidential election. The full 25 years of columns can now be viewed in the Archive section of TBWNS.com and it has to be said, there are a lot of very wild misses in the predictions category! Conversely, every now and then, this column says something that nobody else says for a couple of decades, which then becomes conventional wisdom. The weekly puzzle for readers is to figure which column falls into which category! Continue reading →

The news recently that the 1,400-foot pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue is facing severe structural issues because the architect used the wrong kind of concrete causes one to question yet again the joys of big city living. Apartments in that building go for $30 million or so, for which you could buy a very nice Georgian country house in one of England’s more fashionable counties or a late-Victorian gothic palace in New York’s Hudson Valley. With the Islamic Marxist Zohran Mamdani about to become Mayor of New York and expropriate you, why the hell would you stay there? Continue reading →

Gold’s rapid price rise through $4,000 illustrates the collapse of conventional fiat currencies. Rather than look at gold’s rise, you should consider the dollar’s fall, with $1,000 dropping from 1 ounce of gold as recently as 2016 to 0.24 ounces today. Other fiat currencies have behaved similarly to that 76% decline over the last decade. President Biden’s freezing of Russian dollar reserves in 2022 also showed the dollar to be politically vulnerable as an international trading unit. There is thus a strong chance that all fiat currencies will shortly go the way of the Continental, the Assignat and the paper mark of 1923. Continue reading →

Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned it. The result by 1700 was a China that, however rich, was open to conquest by the West. The parallels with today’s Europe are clear, and the result for Europe may be similar. Continue reading →

Free trade economists are very fond of quoting David Ricardo’s (1772-1823) principle of Comparative Advantage, first expounded in his “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” in 1817. Ricardo was one of our greatest economists, but his principle of Comparative Advantage, like much of modern mathematical economics, rested on shaky assumptions and thus had flaws even when it was first propounded (as Ricardo himself admitted). Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage still gives its proponents status among economists and think tanks, but today, like most luxury beliefs, it immiserates ordinary people. Continue reading →