The Martin Hutchinson Place
President Trump recently threatened to remove Harvard University’s non-profit charitable status. That is an excellent idea. However, it should not be limited to Harvard, but extended to all charities, eliminating all their tax preferences. The Charity Industrial Complex, representing about 5.5% of GDP in nominal value, subtracts far more than that from our wealth for […]
In our 2010 book “Alchemists of Loss” Kevin Dowd and I examined the record of Wall Street risk management leading up to the 2007-08 financial crisis and concluded that it was seriously lacking. The universal assumption of “Gaussianity” caused participants to lose sight of the possibilities of “fat tails” where the probability of bad outcomes […]
The investment management business has suffered from investors moving their money to index funds, which have much lower fees and are purely mechanical in their investments. Also, much investor money has been diverted to private equity and hedge funds in the belief that those investments offer higher returns. The Efficient Market Hypothesis suggests that it […]
The U.S. Congress is currently debating the Budget for the year to September 30, 2026, where past mostly Biden-era profligacy has left a $2 trillion deficit. I want therefore to discuss what the final Budget should contain, focusing mainly on the tax provisions rather than the expenditure cuts, which should clearly be as Draconian as […]
President Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs sent the markets into a tailspin last week – as I forecast in January, the Biden stock market bubble is finally bursting, and about time too. The hysterical reaction from the left and the economic Whigs of globalization resembles that which faced Lord Liverpool when he introduced the Corn […]
Ever since the Bretton Woods exchange rate system ended in 1971, the world has used exchange rates between most currencies that float freely. After 54 years, we can surely say this has not worked; the dollar price of gold, the truest indicator of real inflation, is approaching 100 times its $35 Bretton Woods price. The […]
CDU chief Friedrich Merz’s economically suicidal net-zero constitutional change in the Bundestag and the recent spate of anti-capitalist legal judgements in Britain and the U.S. highlight the alarming rise in economic illiteracy not only in the legal profession, but among politicians, journalists and pundits in general. Big Government, regulation and above all the rise of […]
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney flew to London last week for talks with Britain’s Kier Starmer, both of them upset about President Trump’s aggression, populism and protectionism. Starmer’s immediate instinct, to snuggle ever closer to the corrupt rotting carcass of the European Union will do Britain no good, nor will Carney’s instinct to create a […]
Those still supporting globalist free-trade high-immigration policies are accused of “Zombie Reaganism,” though that policy mix is more Zombie Bushism, derived from the gimcrack “Washington Consensus.” Now Zombie Reaganites, notably Dan McLaughlin of “National Review” have accused President Trump’s followers of “Zombie McKinleyism” – support of high tariffs and protectionism generally — and suggested they […]
The Atlanta Fed’s advance estimate of Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter has recently turned sharply negative, to caterwauling glee from the usual suspects in the media and the Blob. Their rapture is economically irrational; GDP was deliberately designed to include government spending, thus flattering orgies of waste such as the Biden administration. It […]