Utopia, you are standing in it!

According to polling data, President Biden is not getting good grades for economic policy.

Part of that is because of inflation, though I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the blame belongs with the Federal Reserve rather than Biden. And the big mistake from the Fed took place before Biden even took office.

Unfortunately, the President is not trying to make things better. His appointments to the Fed suggest he doesn’t understand the need for good monetary policy.

And all of his major legislative initiatives (the so-called stimulus, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the pork-filled infrastructure legislation, and the cronyist handouts to the semiconductor industry) have increased the size and scope of government.

For what it’s worth, I think Biden’s big challenge – both politically and economically – is that Americans are losing ground. Simply stated, prices are increasing faster than incomes.

But that isn’t stopping the Administration…

If you are looking for a reasonably compact review of Russian history encompassing the last three decades of the twentieth century, Princeton University historian and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin’s book ARMAGEDDON AVERTED, THE SOVIET COLLAPSE 1970-2000 should be considered.  Published in 2008 it foresaw some of the problems we are experiencing today with Russia and looking back fourteen years later Kotkin would not be shocked by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  Kotkin has written two volumes of his biographical trilogy of Joseph Stalin; STALIN: PARADOXES OF POWER, 1878-1928 and STALIN: WAITING FOR HITLER, 1929-1941, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.  Kotkin is an exceptional historian blessed with a pleasing writing style and the ability to synthesize vast amounts of historical information and documentation that the general reader along with professional colleagues can admire and enjoy.  With the war raging…

The Listener magazine this week reported the results of a caption contest they’d run for a photo of Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr.

I’d suggested what seemed to me a rather more apt caption.

One good thing about the Reserve Bank is that they do report their balance sheet in some detail every month, and yesterday they released the numbers for the end of August. August was not a good month for the government bond market: yields rose further and the market value of anyone’s bond holdings fell. And thus the Reserve Bank’s claim on the government, under the indemnity the Minister of Finance provided them in respect of the LSAP programme, mounted.

This is the line item from the balance sheet

A new record high at just over…

The old saying that a ‘week is a long time in politics’ can rarely have been more apt. The changes in Westminster have been overshadowed by the transition in the Monarchy. But the new Prime Minister has also begun to tackle the challenges facing the UK economy.

The first big policy announcement was a freeze on energy bills. The ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ will cap the unit price of energy for households for two years, with the government compensating suppliers for any additional costs. Similar support is also being offered to businesses and other non-domestic energy users, such as schools, initially for a period of six months.

This is a dramatic turnaround from Liz Truss’s apparentdismissalof more ‘handouts’ in the early days of her leadership campaign. The Energy Price Guarantee is another massive state intervention in the markets which will subsidise the energy bills of every household…

Ever since I’ve been writing about house prices – more or less the life of this blog – one of the things that has struck (and sobered) me is that I do not know of (and no one has ever been able to point me to) an example of a country or even a region that having once messed up its housing and urban land regulation, generating absurdly high house price to income ratios has undone things and returned to sustainably low price to income ratios (perhaps fluctuating around three times). There are, of course, many places in the United States where price to income ratios never went crazy. But never having dug a deep hole is a different matter than getting out of one once dug. One reads occasionally – even briefly on this blog – of how easy it is to build in Tokyo (and a culture of…

As Germans and Brits stock up on woollen blankets and candles, the world has a chance to avoid the perfectly avoidable.

In both cases, an obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has them scrambling for reliable energy – as if thousands of lives depend on it – which they literally do.

In Germany and the UK, electricity prices are truly punitive – such that power is now out of reach for low-income households; thousands of small businesses are under pressure, like never before.

Oh, and low-margin energy-hungry businesses – like mineral processing and metal fabrication – will simply disappear off the map. No doubt destined for China, where power costs are a tiny fraction of those suffered in the virtue-signalling West.

Australia, a first-rate country run by third-rate people, has been overrun by lunatics from the hard green left. Its Federal Government, a Green/Labor Alliance, has…

There are numerous biographies of Sigmund Freud, the best ones I have read include Peter Gay’s FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIMES, Joel Whitebrook’s FREUD: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY, and an earlier work, Ronald W. Clark’s FREUD: THE MAN AND THE CAUSE.  The latest monograph SAVING FREUD: THE RESCUERS WHO BROUGHT HIM TO FREEDOM by Andrew Nagorski is not a complete biography but one that focuses on how Freud and fifteen of his followers managed to escape Austria in 1938 as Hitler and his Nazis achieved their Anschluss with Austria triggering a wave of anti-Semitic violence.  While Nagorski provides biographical details of Freud’s life, his main thrust is the years leading up to World War II.  Nagorski tells an engrossing tale of how there was little margin for error for Freud as he escaped Nazi persecution.

Nagorski a former Newsweek correspondent has written a number of…

“September ’77Port Elizabeth weather fine It was business as usual
In police room 619.” This is the first line from a Peter Gabriel song titled “Biko” .

When I first heard it, I didn’t know who Biko was or what the context of the song was. Because I liked the song I made it my business to find out. What I discovered shocked me. I will not go too much inti the life of Steve Biko, but I will go into his final hours on earth.

He was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.

On August 18, 1977, he and a fellow activist were seized at a…