Regime uncertainty has gained increasing recognition as the current economic troubles have persisted with little or no improvement since the economy reached a cyclical trough early in 2009. As described in my 1997 paper, regime uncertainty pertains to the likelihood that investors’ private property rights in their capital and the income it yields will be…
Read More »

Big business leaders—heretofore merry shills for Obama’s disastrous policies—have finally woken up to the fact that such policies are bad even for those with friends in the White House. The Chairman of the Business Roundtable, a group whose support helped further ObamaCare, Cap-and-Trade, and any and all Keynesian “stimulus” spending, now warns: By reaching…
Read More »

Speaking to CNBC in Las Vegas recently, Steve Wynn, the billionaire developer and operator of entertainment properties, said: “Washington is unpredictable these days. No one has any idea what’s next . . . the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying recovery.” Wynn complains of “wild,…
Read More »

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Gary S. Becker, Steven J. Davis, and Kevin M. Murphy discuss how the government’s multifaceted efforts to “reform” health care, energy and environmental controls, financial regulation, taxation, monetary policy-making, and various other aspects of the politico-economic order have created such great uncertainty that business people are reluctant to…
Read More »

In a November 3 article, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate cash holdings have reached extraordinary levels: Stung by the financial crisis, companies are holding more cash — and a greater percentage of assets in cash — than at any time in the past 40 years. In the second quarter, the 500 largest…
Read More »

In the mid-1990s, when I was engaged in the research that would eventually be published early in 1997 in an article titled “Regime Uncertainty” (a modestly revised version of which appears as chapter 1 of my Depression, War, and Cold War), I had not read Raymond Moley’s book After Seven Years, published in 1939….
Read More »

The February issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting article on the politicking associated with the Fannie/Freddie debacle. Toward the end of the story (p. 146), the author, Bethany McLean, describes a late-stage episode in this tale that nicely exemplifies the concept of regime uncertainty. I proposed the idea of regime uncertainty in a 1997 article…
Read More »

In an article published in 1997 titled “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War,” I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to advance our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The…
Read More »

The only way to win a trade war is not to fight one.

A contest is under way in the world between the forces of creation, improvement, and progress and the forces of destruction, spoliation, and retrogression. This contest has been going on for thousands of years, and except during brief interludes the negative forces always kept the positive forces firmly in check. Roughly 200 to 300…
Read More »