The Black Death of 1348 was a gigantic human tragedy, but for most of those involved and their descendants, it had one enormous silver lining: serfs’ rights and living standards soared to previously undreamed-of levels in the following 150 years, as labor shortages took hold. As we emerge from a similar albeit thankfully less severe […]

The United States is currently in a situation where, after a short and beleaguered period of partial opposition control, one party controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, the media and the tech sector. We have seen such dominance before in Britain: in the Whig Supremacy of 1714-62 where with Royal […]

Although it represented my youth, I am by no means nostalgic for 1973-74. In Britain, it gave us a banking crash, the 3-day week, the lead-up to 25% inflation and the most left-wing Labour government Britain ever had. In the United States, it gave us the nullification of 1972’s landslide election victory, a resurgence in […]

The 25-year asset bubble has caused a crescendo of corporatism, as large corporations, their values swollen by asset price inflation, have sought to impose themselves on our lives. Their interaction with the left of politics has been especially poisonous, with “corporate-woke” schemes generated by top management threatening to eliminate the interests of the shareholders who […]

As predicted in these columns a decade ago, globalization did not work, and has now gone the way of the dinosaur. It is not however clear what will replace it. The international institutions are still there, exerting their influence like stegosauri who missed the memo about the end of the Jurassic. Western “woke” governments are […]

The Fed, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of England are planning digital currencies linked to their currencies. Their real objective is to stop people using cash so they can create even more distorted interest rate structures. Their new constructions will thus combine the insecurities of digital currencies with the Gosplan approach to […]

The above was the supposed advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to President Herbert Hoover after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It was good advice, which Hoover did not follow, thus landing the country in a decade of Great Depression. However, if Mellon’s advice was good after the crash, how much more intelligent would […]

U.S. corporate earnings and the stock market in general have become divorced from reality, with corporations increasingly ignoring stockholders in favor of a politically correct “woke” agenda. This is dangerous for society and it is not capitalism. The solution is for stockholders, investment analysts and designers of tax codes to focus laser-like on dividends. Actual […]

There is no question the quality of economic policymaking peaked under Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool (1812-27) and has gone into sad decline ever since. But hills have two sides. So, the question is: how far back must you go to find economic policy as bad as that in today’s United States, to […]