World lenders have dismissed warnings from credit rating firms and kept buying and holding U.S. Treasuries for security. The likely reason is that our tax system is stronger than Europe's. The major difference is that Europe has come to rely heavily on VATs, while the U.S. stands alone in not...

Anderson establishes the reality of an 18-year cycle in real estate prices, 1800 to date, emphasizing the land element, mainly urban land and subsoil resources. He relates this to privatization, which he calls “enclosureâ€, although he does not trace the history back to the 16th Century...

Construction is not the best use of capital when the objective is to make jobs, and loanable funds are scarce. Construction is more capital-intensive than labor-intensive. In addition, we presently have a glut of finished but unused buildings, the result of years of fiscal bias that has diverted...

In 2010 there was a contest to discover and recognize the economists who foresaw and warned of the crash that came in 2008. Fred Foldvary foretold the crash exceptionally early and exceptionally precisely, writing in a refereed journal article in 1997: “the next major bust, 18 years after the...