The way that central banks responded to the global financial crisis almost 20 years ago is often derided as “printing money” and “debasement”. This shorthand is odd. Whereas a Roman emperor might deba

The new “toys for tots”, or so-called “Trump Accounts” savings programme announced by Donald Trump set our mind spinning. The idea is that the federal government will place $1,000 in an investment acc

We are in a real-life game of Risk. In 2019, Fiona Hill, an official at the US National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term, said the Russians had informally proposed a plan whereby they

In May 2008, I was in Ireland on a holiday I eventually had to cut short because the property and credit bubble had made everything absurdly expensive and blown my budget. One day, I fell into convers

FOUR WEEKS BEFORE THE BEGINNING of his second term as President, Donald Trump abruptly floated the idea of taking back the Panama Canal. It had been a quarter-century since the U.S. formally ceded to

How’s the trade war going? Short answer: as badly as expected. Capricious tariffs have shown the rest of the world that the US cannot be trusted. And they have pushed trading partners away and closer