Month: December 2024

The Bear’s Lair: Emerging Markets in a Protectionist World

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 Bear’s Lair: The Rise of a Neo-Communist Europe

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 Bear’s Lair: Don’t throw Lina Khan out with the bathwater

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 […]

The Bear’s Lair: The Strange Death of Liberal America

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 Bear’s Lair: Scott Bessent must be the anti-Soros

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 […]