All Posts Tagged With: "free market"

Markets – free markets – are meant to be unstable. They are meant to crack-up from time to time. And thank God they do. Otherwise, we’d be stuck forever with zombie industries and dead end investments.

Following months of heated public debate and aggressive closed-door negotiations, Congress finally cast a historic vote on healthcare late Sunday evening.

For example, it appears China is beginning to throw its considerable economic weight around. It’s doing so in a tentative, experimental manner, not sure if it will offend but not seeming to care all that much. And why should it? The world is perfectly happy to do business with the largest emerging market of the next fifty years. Other issues-human rights, the environment, and the Rule of Law-are secondary.

Free market capitalism is the “god that failed,” writes Martin Wolf. Thus does Financial Times lead off a feeble chorus of lament in its “Future of Capitalism” series. What do we do now? is the question. Can capitalism be tamed? Can it be harnessed? “Yes we can!” says America’s president.

Yesterday, the stock market continued its recovery. The Dow was up 247 points. Oil sank to $54. Gold lost $7.40 to come to rest at $811…

When capital is allocated in a free market, it moves toward the productive, and the economy tends to prosper. By the same token, when it is misallocated, an economy can hit the skids. We’ve had decades of misallocated capital in the U.S. Instead of saving, we’ve been spending… way beyond our means.

The two great political figures of the last thirty years were Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan. These titans from the two sides of the Atlantic led the way to a new idea of how the world should work. Thenceforth, capitalism was king. But it was a new kind of capitalism they had crowned, one with a strange, unnatural face. It was not the old free enterprise, king of the jungle, red in tooth and claw.