LONDON: Nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, many are wondering why economic recovery is taking so long. Indeed, its sluggishness has confounded even the experts. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world (...)
LONDON: Historically, the term “fair trade” has meant many things. The Fair Trade League was founded in Britain in 1881 to restrict imports from foreign countries. In the United States, businesses and labor unions use “fair trade” laws to construct (...)
LONDON: “Deficits are always bad,” thunder fiscal hawks. Not so, replies strategic investment analyst H. Wood Brock in an interesting new book, The American Gridlock. A proper assessment, Brock argues, depends on the “composition and quality of (...)
LONDON: Europe is now haunted by the specter of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their economies through the wringer.
It doesn't seem to be helping. Their economies are still tumbling, and the (...)
LONDON: The financial crisis that started in 2007 shrunk the world economy by 6% in two years, doubling unemployment. Its proximate cause was predatory bank lending, so people are naturally angry and want heads and bonuses to roll — a sentiment (...)
LONDON: Germany has been leading the opposition in the European Union to any write-down of troubled eurozone members' sovereign debt. Instead, it has agreed to establish bailout mechanisms such as the European Financial Stability Facility and the (...)
LONDON: The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that to have the last word requires only outliving your opponents. His great good fortune was to outlive Keynes by almost 50 years, and thus to (...)
LONDON: Everyone knows that Greece will default on its external debt. The only question concerns the best way to arrange it so that no one really understands that Greece is actually defaulting.
On this topic, there is no shortage of expert plans (...)
LONDON: Recently, at a literary festival in Britain, I found myself on a panel discussing free speech. For liberals, free speech is a key index of freedom. Democracies stand for free speech; dictatorships suppress it.
When we in the West look (...)
LONDON: “Shorting” is a tactic well known among the financial cognoscenti. It means betting against an asset with borrowed money in the expectation of making a profit when its value goes down.
A speculator can “short” a government by borrowing (...)
LONDON: History has no final verdicts. Major shifts in events and power bring about new subjects for discussion and new interpretations.
Fifty years ago, as de-colonization accelerated, no one had a good word to say for imperialism. It was (...)
LONDON: Is there more to be said about Egypt? Hosni Mubarak has been sacrificed to save the military regime. A “strongman” who cannot keep order in the streets is of no use to anyone. Whether “democracy” will ensue is much more dubious. Judging on (...)
LONDON: In 1995, I published a book called “The World After Communism”. Today, I wonder whether there will be a world after capitalism.
That question is not prompted by the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Capitalism has always had crises, (...)
LONDON: Last month, while in New York City, I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. To accommodate his security needs, the hotel had been converted into a fortress, much like Israel (...)
LONDON: The just concluded G-20 meeting in Seoul broke up without agreement on either currencies or trade. China and the United States accused each other of deliberately manipulating their currencies to get a trade advantage. The Doha Round of (...)
LONDON: I have become increasingly less hopeful about prospects for a rapid recovery from the global recession. Coordinated fiscal expansion ($5 trillion) by the world's leading governments arrested the downward slide, but failed to produce a (...)
YAROSLAVL: Russia is said by many to lack a “civil society.” But it partly makes up for this by having a rather interesting public sphere, in which serious topics do get debated, and where glimpses of the great are not entirely confined to televised (...)
LONDON: The “laws of holes” are as unforgiving as the laws of physics. If you find yourself in a hole and want to get out, the first thing you do is to stop digging. If you confront a number of holes to fix and want to know which to fix first, you (...)
LONDON: All intellectual systems rely on assumptions that do not need to be spelled out because all members of that particular intellectual community accept them. These “deep” axioms are implicit in economics as well, but, if left unscrutinized, (...)
LONDON: For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic big-government policies. But John Maynard Keynes's relationship with social democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of social democratic policy — (...)
LONDON: “Through the contrivance and cunning of stock jobbers there hath been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any (...)
LONDON: Dramatic challenges, and mediocre responses: that is the history of the European Union. All too rarely does the EU rise to the level of events, which is why Europe is fading economically and geopolitically.
The 1958 Treaty of Rome, which (...)
LONDON: Two alternative approaches dominate current discussions about banking reform: break-up and regulation. The debate goes back to the early days of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal, which pitted "trust-busters against (...)
LONDON: How real is the danger of inflation for the world economy? Opinion on this matter is divided between conservative economists and official bodies like the IMF and OECD.
The IMF and OECD project very low inflation rates over the next few (...)
LONDON: From next year, on swearing allegiance to the Queen, all members of Britain's House of Lords - and I am one of them - will be required to sign a written commitment to honesty and integrity. Unexceptionable principles, one might say. But, (...)