The Martin Hutchinson Place
Around a third of U.S. equities are now owned by index funds or by institutions mimicking index funds and the percentage so owned is steadily rising – passively owned institutional equities recently overtook those actively managed. This is a negation of capitalism; if investors are not making rational decisions about their investments, the market’s sorting […]
Sanae Takaichi’s thumping recent victory in Japan’s elections gives hope that Japan’s economy may finally be recovering. There is much recovery to do; at IMF estimates for 2026, Japan’s GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) is $56,444, below even badly-run Britain’s at $65,215 and far below the United States at $92,883, let alone its […]
They laughed when he demonstrated his new communication device. A distinguished academic who had discovered the medium he was using had said there were no practical applications. Another distinguished British academic had failed to make such an apparatus practicable, despite prolonged efforts. As a young unknown foreigner, with no formal education beyond high school, how […]
This column went on record before President George W. Bush’s selection of Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman and said that of all the likely candidates, he would be the worst. In the next decade, that judgement was miserably justified. Now President Trump has avoided the funny-money favorite Rick Rieder of BlackRock and instead appointed Kevin […]
The former cabinet ministers Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick’s defections to the Reform party suggest that the disastrous “Conservative” governments of 2010-24 may indeed finally be extinguishing that long-lived and very occasionally illustrious party. Yet Reform’s Nigel Farage has shown himself prone to the faults of the 2010-24 “Conservatives” in barring original thinkers such as […]
President Trump wants the United States to buy Greenland, and European recalcitrance against the idea led him to impose further tariffs on the EU to spur negotiations. Trump’s negotiating techniques may be rough, but the geopolitical advantages of a U.S. takeover of Greenland are clear, and EU hatred of Trump should not be allowed to […]
The most Important financial market news this week was not the U.S. Justice Department’s opening an investigation into Fed Chairman Powell over the Fed’s grossly mismanaged building project, but Powell’s hysterically arrogant and entitled response to it, which was joined by other central bank chiefs. The Fed Chairman is not above the law, and the […]
In major markets, there have been two occasions when stock market indices have crashed and stayed below their peak for a quarter-century. One was the U.S. in 1929, where the Dow Jones Industrial Index finally topped its 1929 peak in 1954. The other was Japan, where the December 1989 Nikkei peak of 38,915.87 was surpassed […]
In a sound political system, it should be obvious that the principal task of politicians is to maximize the living standards and life quality of the people they govern. Given that truism, the politician’s principal economic aim should be to ensure that their constituents’ labor is as expensive as possible. This will ensure that new […]
In discussing modern American, British or global politics, I often find myself on a different planet from other commentators, because my preferred political system is not that of any modern polity, but that of Britain under Lord Liverpool’s government from 1812 to 1827. Most of the policies were better in that government’s earlier years, but […]