The World Economic Forum, sponsor of the annual Davos meeting, proposes a “Great Reset” of the capitalist system. The People’s Republic of China nominally adheres to the Communism of its founder, Chairman Mao Ze-dong. Yet in practice, the societies each advocates bear a remarkable similarity to each other and share two overriding characteristics: they are […]

Around 1760, the English banking system, which had been concentrated in London, sprouted a plethora of country banks in provincial towns, over 800 by 1813, That produced a unique financial environment, in which both expertise and money were readily available locally for new projects throughout provincial England and Wales. This greatly facilitated the Industrial Revolution, […]

A new McKinsey’s report, featured in the Financial Times, shows that over the past 25 years, the dominance of large companies has increased, as has the share of capital returns in the economy, while wage levels have risen far less than productivity. The FT’s solution to this is more state meddling, with redistributive policies to […]

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 […]