Emerging markets were huge beneficiaries of the fall of Communism and the globalization trend that followed it in 1991-2008. Since then, the story has been much darker for poor countries in all regions of the world, with many “emerging markets” ceasing to emerge and relapsing back into long-term poverty. With President Trump’s advent, more protectionism […]

The European Union was always a somewhat anti-free-market association, one reason why the then more liberal United Kingdom should not have joined it. In recent years, however, it has gone beyond the mild social democracy baked into its constitutional arrangements, and has become more authoritarian, more oriented towards central planning through its regulations, and recently […]

The Biden Administration has generally been startling in its lack of originality on economic policy, with one exception: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan has reversed the FTC’s long-standing positive attitude to mergers and acquisitions, taking a highly skeptical attitude to them, based partly on her own anti-capitalist ideology. While the incoming Trump administration […]

George Dangerfield’s 1935 “The Strange Death of Liberal England” set out how increasing unrest and inept government in 1910-14 led to the collapse of the Liberal Party that had ruled Britain for most of the 19th century. A similar book could be written today about the collapse since 2000 of the centrist, well governed “Liberal” […]

The background of Scott Bessent, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, contains warning signals for fans of Trump and the U.S. economy, in that he worked for George Soros, for whom he was instrumental in the highly profitable 1992 trashing of the pound. For Trump, he must pursue an anti-Soros agenda, sweeping away the remnants […]

One enormous potential advantage of President Trump’s re-election is that it may enable the United States to end the perpetual war in which it has been engaged since 2001. That war has caused U.S. public debt to spiral from 30% of GDP to over 100%, destabilized large sections of the world turning them into unproductive […]

The great Ron Paul is associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and is well known for wishing to abolish one of the least effective government entities: the Federal Reserve. As the Department of Education and other hallowed government entities become one with Nineveh and Tyre, Paul’s question should be asked, whose answer bears […]

Before President Donald Trump’s substantial re-election, Elon Musk had promised to head a “Department Of Government Efficiency” that might cut $2 trillion from the Federal budget, and even floated the idea of bringing in the great Dr. Ron Paul, who at 89 is an encouragement to us all. That seems an eminently attractive goal, entirely […]

The Conservative Party, of which Kemi Badenoch has just been elected leader, has been betraying its supporters since 1834. The new Reform party has not yet begun betraying its supporters, but undoubtedly will if it selects parliamentary candidates centrally. Those Brits wishing to achieve the distant miracle of having their country competently governed therefore have […]

No less an authority than Mohamed El-Erian, former CEO of the $2 trillion bond giant PIMCO, has now said in the Financial Times that we should pay attention to the rise in the gold price above $2,700, up around 40% over the past year. El-Erian is a former advisor to President Obama and perennial bond […]