The Future of Capitalism

This year's installment of my annual William Safire-style column of predictions for the year ahead appears in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check it out by clicking here.

U.S.-Israel Treaty Would Answer U.N.

December 28, 2016 at 11:35 am

It's a bit far afield from the usual topics here (though squarely related to the Constitution, which is right in our strike zone), but I nonetheless highly recommend my column this week, which is probably the best thing I've written all year. It's about the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's settlements and floats the idea of responding to it with a formal U.S.-Israel treaty. You can check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

In One-Party Rule, Power and Peril

December 25, 2016 at 8:23 am

The precedents for presidents whose political party controls the House and Senate — the position Donald Trump will be in — are the topic of my column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check out the full column by clicking the link here.

2 Reader Comments

Jamie Dimon Interview

December 22, 2016 at 9:10 am

The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek in which he makes some interesting points about infrastructure spending and the tone coming from Washington:

I'm going to oversimplify this, but what happens with infrastructure is that the Democrats say, "Spend money. Just spend money." And, of course, we do a lot of that. A lot of people feel it just goes out to bridges to nowhere. So the Republicans are right to be questioning how the money gets spent. There are a lot of ways to do that. A lot of it, by the way, is to give it back to this mayor who knows how to do it. We don't want Washington to tell the mayor what he needs....

Ray Dalio on Trump

December 20, 2016 at 2:38 pm

Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates has some reflections on President-elect Trump:

Regarding economics, if you haven't read Ayn Rand lately, I suggest that you do as her books pretty well capture the mindset. This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers. It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with significant power. The shift from the past administration to this administration will probably be even more significant than the 1979-82 shift from the socialists to the capitalists in the UK, US, and Germany when Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl came to power. ...

Political Family Dynasties

December 20, 2016 at 1:44 pm

The website Zocalo Public Square asked me for a post-election piece about political families and has published it. The link is here.

Trump Versus the Bureaucracy

December 20, 2016 at 1:32 pm

The coming clash between Trump and the permanent government workers known as "we bes" — "We be here before you're here. We be here after you're here" — is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax (here) and Reason (here).

Modern Maccabees

December 20, 2016 at 1:19 pm

A Jewish Agency for Israel program that has put young Israelis on 71 college campuses in North America was the topic of my Sunday column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check the column out here.

Alphonse Fletcher Jr.

December 14, 2016 at 9:52 am

The retirement fund of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority — which pays the pensions of unionized bus and subway train drivers — has lost the entire $25 million it invested in a hedge fund operated by Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher Jr., the Boston Globe reports. The Globe doesn't mention Mr. Fletcher's $4.5 million gift to Harvard to endow the university professor chair held by Henry Louis Gates Jr., but the case of Harvard hanging on to its $4.5 million from Mr. Fletcher while the retirees (or the taxpayers who backstop them) settle for a zero is grist for a Harvard Business School case study, or a philosophy course in moral reasoning, or, at the very least, an Alex Beam column, or something.

Elite Post-Election Pregnancy Panic

December 13, 2016 at 8:54 am

Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Atul Gawande worries that pregnancy will be unaffordable if ObamaCare is repealed. I respond in my column this week. Please check out the column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

2 Reader Comments

Elizabeth Warren, Cyberbully

December 13, 2016 at 8:35 am

Pretty good column by Andrew Ross Sorkin on Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, posting an online attack on a money manager, Whitney Tilson: "Ms. Warren appears to be suffering from the same affliction that Mr. Trump's critics accuse of him: a knee-jerk, fact-free reaction to something she had read in the news."

The whole situation does not reflect well on Senator Warren at all.

Trump-Hitler

December 13, 2016 at 8:31 am

Somehow, even in an article headlined "Donald Trump could be good for the economy," Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff manages to reach the Trump-Hitler comparison:

At the risk of hyperbole, it's wise to remember that you don't have to be a nice guy to get the economy going. In many ways, Germany was as successful as America at using stimulus to lift the economy out of the Great Depression.

On the positive side, at least there is some good Krugman-bashing in the article:

beware of pundits who are certain that Trump will bring economic catastrophe. On election eve, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman unequivocally insisted that a Trump victory would lead to a stock market collapse, with no recovery in sight. Investors who relied on his insights lost a lot of money.

Shopping For ObamaCare Is Torture

December 11, 2016 at 12:17 pm

More than six years since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, shopping for health insurance on one of the online "exchanges" created by the law is an exercise in frustration. My column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal has details; please check the column out by clicking here.

6 Reader Comments

Trump and Drug Prices

December 7, 2016 at 10:29 am

Pharmaceutical stocks were down this morning after President-elect Trump gave an interview to Time magazine in which he said, "I'm going to bring down drug prices. I don't like what's happened with drug prices."

Salman, Scalia, and Bharara

December 6, 2016 at 2:13 pm

The Supreme Court this morning handed down a unanimous decision, written by Justice Alito, in the case of Salman v. United States, in which Bassam Salman was sentenced to three years in jail for trading on inside information that originated with a relative who was an investment banker at Citigroup.

A few points are worth initially mentioning in reaction to the decision.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, is already claiming vindication.

"The court stood up for common sense and affirmed what we have been arguing from the outset -- that the law absolutely prohibits insiders from advantaging their friends and relatives at the expense of the trading public," Bharara said in an e-mailed statement reported by Bloomberg. "Today's decision is a victory for fair markets and those who believe that the system should not be rigged."