The yield curve (a plot of interest rates versus the maturities of securities of equal credit quality) is a handy economic and investment tool. It generally slopes upward because investors expect higher returns when their money is tied up for long periods. When the economy is growing robustly, it tends to steepen as more firms break ground on long-term investment projects. For example, firms may decide to build new factories when the economy is rosy. Since these projects take years to complete, firms issue long-term bonds to finance the construction.

One of many accusations of the economics discipline is that it spends too much time on the ideas of rich white men, long since buried.

The most recent consensus estimates for global Gross Domestic Product growth show a healthy “synchronised” development in most economies. Expectations for the major economies are much stronger than what economists expected at the end of 2016 for the next three years. Seems all concerns about a global slowdown and subsequent recession have disappeared. What has changed?

Whether it’s for cheap steel or cheap tires, Americans are supposed to be afraid of trade with China because it provides us with products we want at low prices. But to the damage allegedly inflicted on our economy by those who would save us money, must we now add…artificial Christmas trees?

In the past, a few brave iconoclasts have taken exception to the treatment Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol has received from his critics. 

While a fictional character created by Charles Dickens, Scrooge has become, in the minds of many, a representative of the imagined miserly financiers who serve as caricatures of capitalists everywhere. 

This has led some defenders of markets to step in and offer a defense of Scrooge.

Psychiatry possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is much greater than in any other area of medicine. Politicians realized that and abused psychiatry for blaming their opponents as mentally sick, retarded and dangerous. It was happening all around the world but was mostly prominent under authoritarian and totalitarian socialist regimes. Now it became a part of the arsenal of the political Left here which is completely crazed about the counterrevolutionary results of the last presidential elections.

Thanks to the automobile, Americans live in an age of extremely inexpensive transportation, by historical measures. 

In the United States in 2015, there was approximately one motor vehicle per 1.21 people. With the exception of the small, wealthy city states of San Marino and Monaco, the United States employs more motor vehicles than any other country.