arlier this month, I took part in an online debate for U.S. News & World Report about whether Europe or the United States was in deeper fiscal trouble. I wrote that Europe faced a bigger mess, though I warned that the United States was making the same mistakes of costly and inefficient welfare-state policies and […]

A couple of months ago, after reading an excellent column in the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, I joked that we should send Obama to Rome for an economics lesson. I now completely retract that statement. There may be some economically astute people who write for L’Osservatore Romano, but they are offset by the economic […]

I have no idea whether George Santayana was a good philosopher, but he certainly was right when he wrote, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Consider the fools in the U.S. Senate. They just voted to expand Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies, apparently thinking that re-inflating the housing […]

The welfare states of Europe are in deep trouble. Decades of over-taxing and over-spending have sapped economic vitality and produced high levels of debt. The high debt levels, by themselves, might not be a problem if European governments implemented good policy. After all, debt was even higher in many nations after World War II than […]

This is getting surreal. We now have layers of bailouts around the world. Different nations are doing their own bailouts. On top of that, the Europeans have set up something called the European Financial Stability Facility, which does bailouts across the continent. And then there’s the International Monetary Fund, doing bailouts on a global basis. […]

The governments of Spain, Italy, Belgium and (of course) France recently imposed 15-day bans on “short selling,” which means they are prohibiting people from making investments that would be profitable if certain stocks fall in value. According to the politicians, the bans are being imposed to protect financial markets from “speculators” who cause “panics” by […]