Economy

Of all the parties watching the chaos in the Middle East unfold, one should be rubbing its hands together with particular satisfaction. Russia has not fired a shot in this conflict, lost no allies it cannot afford to lose and has so far gained rather a lot, with more to come. A cynic might call it the perfect war for Vladimir Putin. Moscow’s public reaction has been characteristically theatrical. The Foreign Ministry denounced American and Israeli actions as a “reckless step” and a “dangerous adventure.” Things have gone no further. There has been no announcement of political or military support for Iran from the Kremlin – nor is there likely

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith’s seminal text in the history of economics. Smith gave his name to the institute that I co-founded, so you might expect me to advocate for reading his most famous text. But you shouldn’t. It’s very long, written in elegant but spacious prose and full to exasperation of examples, observations and terminologies that puzzle a modern reader. Read my Condensed Wealth of Nations instead or wait for my cartoon graphic novel to come out later in the year. Smith would see the scale of government today as the greatest tyranny Nonetheless, modern unreadability doesn’t mean that

At a rally in Georgia on Thursday night, President Trump declared that he couldn’t wait “forever” for the Supreme Court to rule on the legitimacy of his sweeping tariff policy. Whether or not the court was listening to his complaint, forever arrived today as it handed Trump a thumping defeat. It struck a blow not only for fiscal but also political sanity. Government intrusion upon the free enterprise system is bound to prove inimical to prosperity and liberty The language of the ruling was as lapidary as it was persuasive. “President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the

“The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” said Donald Trump in his State of the Union address last night, as the Democrats booed and heckled him. Media commentators scoffed at Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. But the President, who estimated that $19 billion had been lost to fraud in Minnesota alone, is if anything underplaying the scale of the problem. The extent of fraud across blue state (that is, Democrat-led) America is truly monstrous, and each week brings fresh revelations of swindling on a truly epic scale. Trump’s now-withdrawn ICE surge in

As the hype builds for the reported $1.5 trillion IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX later this year, there will be plenty of critics who argue the company’s marketing has more hot air than one of its rockets. It has been claimed by some that the IPO will be worth more than the top seven companies currently listed on the London Stock Exchange – including century-old giants such as Shell, HSBC and AstraZeneca – combined. And yes, sure, there is probably an element of wishful thinking in these reports, as there often is with Musk. But SpaceX also has the potential to become one of the giants of the 21st-century economy

Last year might have proved a good time to own shares in the chip-maker Nvidia, along with the booming American tech giants. Or a piece of the defense manufacturers as the world re-arms. Or to hold a position in some of the rapidly growing economies of South America or Asia, or even one of the hyped-up crypto currencies. There were plenty of places investors expected to make money over the past year. As it turned out, however, there was one asset that outpaced them all, even though it generates no income: gold, and to an even greater extent, its junior sibling silver. With government debt soaring out of control, the

The headline from Trump’s Davos speech is clear: I won’t use military force to take Greenland. That’s what the President told the world’s leading politicians and business executives at the World Economic Forum. That declaration was very good news for all of them and for US investors, who immediately started buying stocks, erasing about half the losses suffered Tuesday, when the threat of force seemed possible. They all knew that carrying out that military threat would shatter the institutional foundation of Western security: NATO and US-European relations. Instead of military threats, Trump emphasized America’s disproportionate contributions to European defense since World War Two. It was finally time for them to

Rome Will peace in Ukraine also prove to be a great deal for US business? Vladimir Putin would certainly like Donald Trump to think so. Within days of Trump’s election victory last November, the Kremlin ordered major Russian corporations to prepare detailed proposals for economic cooperation with Washington. Coordinating these efforts were Maxim Oreshkin, deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration, and Kirill Dmitriev, the US-educated Harvard, Stanford and Goldman Sachs alumnus who heads Russia’s sovereign investment fund. According to a major US investor in Russia who eyes a postwar return to the market, among the major Russian corporations setting out potential deals for US companies were Russia’s atomic energy agency

His administration remains fixated with Herbert Hoover economics

Lutnick sounds so much like Trump it’s hard to tell where one man’s monologue ends and the other’s begins