Year: 2015

The Bear’s Lair: Markets are not pricing in increased global risk

When the NASDAQ Composite share index last week touched 5,000, its level at the top of the 2000 tech bubble, sober commentators everywhere including the head of NASDAQ intoned that things were different from 2000 and the market was not in anything like so much of a bubble. They were right. Things are very different […]

The Bear’s Lair: Being old in 2040 will be no fun

There are times when it’s good to be young – the 1960s, with its prosperity and hedonism, were one such. Being old has fewer joys, but you can argue that the 1990s were a halcyon period for the old, when pension funds were swollen by stock appreciation and the senior citizen generation was relatively small. […]

The Bear’s Lair: Sound fiscal management beats infrastructure

The Indian budget on February 28 slackened the much needed effort to move that country’s fisc towards balance in order to spend more on infrastructure. It was accordingly much praised by the Keynesian media worldwide. While the Lord knows infrastructure is much needed in impoverished India, and its cost there is presumably not as bloated […]

Boke Review: Cyprianus Anglicus

Before there were books there were Bokes, large folio things with small print runs and funny spelling. Boke Reviews look at books/bokes published more than 250 years ago, most of which are lost to modern knowledge, and try to rediscover the wisdom hidden in the attitudes and understandings of another era.

The Bear’s Lair: The need for rentier capitalism

Janet Yellen’s testimony to Congress this week, in which she indicated that inflation needed to be heading above 2% before the Fed made even the smallest shift in its zero interest rate policy, indicated that Maynard Keynes’ favored policy of the euthanasia of the rentier has been all too enthusiastically carried out. The rentier is […]

The Bear’s Lair: Robots are not us, they serve us

An NBER paper “Robots are us – Some Economics of Human Replacement” paints a grim picture of our robotic future, in which the robots undermine their customer base, making the vast majority of humanity redundant. As good academic-institution social democrats, the paper’s authors Seth G. Benzell, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Guillermo LaGarda, and Jeffrey D. Sachs […]

How Charles Jenkinson turned a Whig government Tory

When William Pitt the younger formed his government in December 1783, it was a Whig one. Pitt himself, his two Secretaries of State and most of his Cabinet were Whigs. Yet by his death in 1806, his long-standing administration was generally accepted as a Tory government, and its direct successors were to continue ruling as […]

About the True Blue Will Never Stain blog

This blog contains the self-directed writings of Martin Hutchinson, mostly on history, political economy and finance. It does not include those writings on economics and finance that are produced to order, heavily edited, and published primarily elsewhere.

The Bear’s Lair: The productivity death spiral

Fourth quarter U.S. labor productivity growth surprised markets last week by coming in at minus 1.8%. Over the past four years, annual productivity growth has averaged only 0.7% per annum. That’s far below the historical average of around 2% annually. The productivity growth shortfall has highly negative implications for U.S. living standards. Contrary to the […]