Reports

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently warned the Senate of the possibility of “suffering and death” if the U.S. ended its lockdowns too soon. For all his acclaimed brilliance, Fauci confessed that the reason for shutting down and locking in the economy and society was not the proven effects of COVID-19 but ...

A popular claim is that the 1918–19 flu pandemic killed millions but no biggie, the Roaring ’20s started the following year. It’s onward and upward, baby, once we toss the masks. Wrong. Completely, totally, dead wrong. The drivers of the past 75 years of growth — globalization and financialization — ...

Friday’s reckoning drew an especially heavy mail. We vented Mr. George Gilder’s unorthodox opinions about the virus. He claimed its actual threat has been fantastically exaggerated, that the terror has little excuse in the facts. But George’s arguings failed to fetch the game. In fact readers seized their own shotguns… ...

The era of waste, fraud and living on borrowed money is dying, and those who’ve known no other way of living are mourning its passing. Its passing was inevitable, for any society that squanders its resources is unsustainable. Any society that rewards fraud above all else is unsustainable. Any society ...

The increasing concentration of the ownership of wealth/assets in the top 10% has an under-appreciated consequence: when only the top 10% can afford to buy assets, that unleashes an almost karmic payback for the narrowing of ownership, a.k.a. soaring wealth and income inequality: assets crash. Most of you are aware ...

Stocks stumbled out of the gate today, at least partially on fears about a resurgence in coronavirus cases. South Korea, which did an excellent job containing the virus, has reported a new batch of cases. Japan and Singapore also reported new cases. Infections are increasing in Germany as well, where ...

Kind heaven, no! A fresh economic scourge is upon the land. Announces CNN: “New Threat to the Economy: Americans Are Saving Like It’s the 1980s.” Is a higher evil possible? Thus we are informed: Americans are slashing their spending, hoarding cash and shrinking their credit card debt as they fear ...

“We’ve seen the lows in March and we will never see those lows again.” So concludes Dr. Jeremy Siegel. Dr. Siegel is a finance professor at the superexcellent Wharton School of Business. But why will we never see March lows again? Is it because the economy has loads of latent ...

Nothing like what we’re witnessing has ever happened before. Even the savviest analysts cannot yet internalize what happened. As I explained earlier, comparisons to the 2008 crisis or even the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression fail to capture the magnitude of the economic damage of the ...

It’s obvious the global economy is painfully fragile. What is less obvious is the bailouts intended to “save” the fragile economy actually increase its fragility, setting up an inevitable collapse of the entire precarious system. Systems that are highly centralized, i.e., dependent on a handful of nodes that are each ...