Martin Hutchinson was a merchant banker with more than 25 years’ experience before moving into financial journalism in 2000, from October 2000 writing “The Bear’s Lair,” a weekly financial and economic column. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MBA from Harvard University. In 2000 Martin moved into journalism, becoming Business and Economics Editor at United Press International. His “Bear’s Lair” column appeared at UPI in 2000-04 and on the Prudent Bear website from 2006-14. As well as that column, Hutchinson was from 2007 to 2014 emerging markets correspondent for the financial website Reuters BreakingViews (appearing frequently in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times). From 2007-2013 he also wrote for the financial website Money Morning. He has appeared on television on the BBC, Fox News, and Fox Business, and has lectured at the Cato Institute, the Texas Workforce Conference, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the National Economists Club and Princeton University. Martin is the author of “Great Conservatives,” (Academica Press, 2004) and with Professor Kevin Dowd, of “Alchemists of Loss,” (Wiley, 2010).
Goldman Sachs announced this week that it was to offer consumer savings accounts over the Internet, with a minimum of $1. It’s not a bad marketing idea; no doubt a “Bank of Dr. Evil” branded savings account would also go well. It appears to indicate that Goldman’s confidence in its core investment banking business is...
Arrests have been made in China over a $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme involving a P2P (person-to-person, without the intervention of a bank) lender. My first response was: P2P lending in the Chinese banking system: what could possibly go wrong? My second, more thoughtful, insight is that distinguishing out-and-out Ponzi schemes from the world economy as...
The market rejoiced on Dec. 5 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 321,000 new U.S. jobs had been created. The general consensus is that the 3.9% third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is the harbinger of a brighter trend. The Economist’s team of forecasters has U.S. growth at 3% in 2015, up from...
“We wanted flying cars, and they gave us 140 characters,” said venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2011. He put his finger on a central dilemma of the New Economy: its innovations can make money (usually through redirecting advertising sales), but they add little or nothing to the overall stock of human knowledge or long-term happiness....
Traditionally, business was the most important political backer of free markets, which made sense because business needs markets in order to exist at all. However, in the last generation, the views of business, as expressed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other outlets, have increasingly diverged from the free-market ideal. As crony capitalist ideas...
Since the crash of 2008, huge attention has been paid by regulators to systemic risk, the risk that some event will cause the crash of the entire banking system, not just of an individual bank. Tens of thousands of pages of financial regulations have been written, and almost as many thousands of speeches have been...