US stocks have tumbled by more than 3% on coronavirus fears. Stocks rebound overnight because that’s what they do. President Donald Trump called the virus “very well under control in our country.” He added, “We’re very close to a vaccine.” The White House said, no, whoops, Trump meant a vaccine…

Just a couple of weeks ago, this newsletter said that the coronavirus kept finding ways to surprise and that markets weren’t taking it seriously enough. Well, surprise! They’re taking it seriously now. Stocks fell a whole bunch this week, with the Dow clocking a rare thousand-point loss, partly…

We knew 2020 would be an interesting year, in the old-curse meaning of the word. It only took two days for us to begin to find out just how interesting it will be. American drone strikes on Thursday killed Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Some…

Fine, Let’s Try Raising Interest Rates One of 2019’s best movies was “Midsommar,” about an unorthodox Swedish summer-solstice party. Now real-life Swedes are doing some unorthodox winter-solstice central banking, hopefully with much less human sacrifice. Sweden’s Riksbank, zigging while the…

One predictable thing about empires is that they eventually fall. We may be watching one fall right now. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the world has been intellectually dominated by a US-UK alliance that John Micklethwait calls the core “Anglosphere” (apologies to lesser…

The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea gets credit for what's known as the Dichotomy Paradox. This is the observation that, in order to get from point A to point B, you have to first go halfway to point B, but before that you must go half of that half-distance, and so on until you theoretically never…