With 35% of the world’s grain supply subject to the disruption of the Russia-Ukraine war, it seems likely that the next six months will see a disruption in global food supplies, in some areas causing famine. If so, that will complete the set of evils supposedly unleashed upon the world by the Four Horsemen of […]

Standard investment textbooks and advisors mandate that you should have a percentage of bonds in your portfolio, the percentage rising with age (my Vanguard page advises me to have fully 70% of my money in them). Yet bonds offer no upside, they do not protect against inflation, and lawyers working for borrowers have ensured there […]

Peabody Energy (NYSE:BTU) share price fell 17% last Monday on news it had made $534 million in margin payments, hedging against the price of its main product: coal. Investors may justifiably feel aggrieved; they successfully called a revival of the coal market, only to be thwarted by an amateurish management that thwarted them. Not to […]

President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic blunder in invading Ukraine has upset the applecart of the post-1991 international order. The outcome of that conflict is currently unknown – there are a wide range of possibilities. However, most of the better outcomes will result in an end to the globalization dream – in reality, nightmare – and a […]

Like any good child of the Cold War era, I was brought up to believe there were white hats and black hats: democratic countries that respected freedoms, even though one might disagree with particular governments, and non-democratic countries, at that time mostly Communist but historically also Fascist, who violated human rights and individual freedoms with […]

Financial media are now worrying that, if the Fed is even hawkish enough to raise rates by 0.5% instead of 0.25% at its meeting in March, the U.S. and global economies will tank. In reality, with producer price inflation at 9.7% in the year to January 2022, even a 0.5% interest rate rise is the […]

Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, celebrating 70 years on the throne, set me to wondering in what ways history would have changed if one of her predecessors had reigned for 70 years. Modern constitutional monarchs have little historical effect, with one exception which I will deal with below, while most of their predecessors, who ascended […]

Portugal’s Socialists recently won an unexpected victory after gaining access to €45 billion in Covid recovery funds – magic doors opened for the party favored by Brussels’ bureaucrats. In Italy, Mario Draghi’s socialist government is propped up by €200 billion in Covid recovery funds, as the years drag on without free elections. This is an […]

Eamonn Fingleton, in The American Conservative, recently wrote a piece “The Confucian Model” about East Asian economies, the analysis in which I thought made sense. However, I disagreed with his conclusion, that, now that this “Confucian” model has been invented, authoritarian societies have a built-in economic advantage over democracies. To me, the benefits of “Confucianism” […]

In November and December 2021, China’s coal consumption rose to record levels, well over half the world’s total. That enabled China to record a 8.1% growth rate in 2021, by far the highest of any major economy. It also coincided with the COP-26 climate change conference, in which Western governments unanimously promised to sacrifice the […]