The Martin Hutchinson Place
For the last decade, cash flow has seemed irrelevant. Interest rates have been close to zero and well below the inflation rate, so that loss-making companies and projects with cost or time overruns could easily raise additional capital. Now, with inflation at 7-8%, interest rates are still negative in real terms. However, whatever the level […]
Imagine being a citizen of the Western Roman Empire early in the reign of the Emperor Honorius (ruled 395 to 423). You would know that the Emperor was not very good, and that the Empire was fighting off the barbarians only through the efforts of General Stilcho (c.359-408). Yet you would look back for better […]
Former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh has published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal expressing support for a digital dollar, lest the United States lose competitive ground to China. Since Warsh is a possible Fed chairman should Republicans gain the Presidency in 2024, his support for a digital dollar is truly alarming, given the civil […]
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-currency exchange FTX, resulting in the loss of at least $1 billion of customer money, will be used to demand more regulation of the crypto-currency business. Yet its growth, collapse and the murky web of corrupt connections surrounding it were a product of the decade of “funny money” that has […]
As we move through the 2020s, the 2010s, the decade between the financial crisis and the COVID outbreak, come into perspective. In terms of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy in the United States and throughout the rich world, it was extreme, worse than the 1970s in its disregard for free-market first principles. The main difference […]
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage climate change activist, was not invited to attend the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, and therefore denounced it, explaining that her true objective was not to battle climate change but to undermine the rotten racist Western capitalist system. Thereby she showed herself in her true colors, which are the […]
The British pension funds’ sudden vulnerability to an interest rate blip two weeks ago due to their misguided derivatives games showed that financiers make the same mistakes, decade after decade. While a few financial techniques are new, the errors are not; indeed they can be traced back to the era when modern finance was being […]
China’s President Xi Jinping is a devotee of Austrian economics. Unfortunately, he does not follow the enlightened and intelligent economics of the “Austrian School” — Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Instead, China’s attempts to dominate the economies of its neighbors through “Belt and Road” investments, its use of slave labor, its […]
The Nobel prize in economics this year went to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for “work adding to understanding of the relationship between banking crises and the broader economy.” Like other Nobels, the prize has a mixed reputation, having been given to outright Marxists like Gunnar Myrdal in the past. Looked at that […]
The Bank of England re-instituted “quantitative easing” last week because British pension funds were threatened with insolvency, having hedged their bond portfolios with unstable derivatives. We have seen this movie before, in 2007-08. Dopey behavior by financial institutions, central banks and regulators causes a massive unnecessary financial crash that blights the lives of billions of […]