Given the strong rebound in the equity markets since March 2009, “most investors believe that 2008 was simply a bad dream from which they’ve now awoken,” starts Gary Shilling in his newly-released tome on deflation, The Age of Deleveraging. “But the optimists don’t seem to realize that the good life and rapid growth that started...Read More

I commented in a previous article that “if you think that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is unpopular, consider the tragic case of Takahashi Korekiyo, who served as Bank of Japan governor from 1911-1913 and as finance minister and prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s.” Mr. Takahashi helped to pull Japan out of the Great...Read More

“The Law of Disruption,” writes Larry Downes in his new book of the same name, “is a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life: technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” Today, we’re going to focus on one particular area of the legal system that modern technology is disrupting—copyrights. This is...Read More

In pre-republican France, upon the passing of a sitting monarch the Duc d’Uzès would proclaim “The King is dead. Long live the King!” The idea, of course, was that a new king was rising up to take the place of the old. The Crown as an institution was alive and well; it was just that...Read More

Neil Howe, who previously co-wrote several groundbreaking books on demographic trends with William Strauss (Generations, The Fourth Turning, Millennials Rising), published a new book in 2008 with Richard Jackson: The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. We consider Howe’s prior work with Strauss to be required reading for anyone...Read More