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The most important price in an economy is the exchange rate between the local currency and the world’s reserve currency — the U.S. dollar. As long as there is an active black‐market (read: free market) for currency and the data …
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Today’s Wall Street Journal carried an edifying op-ed penned by Mokgweetsi Masisi, the President of Botswana. That Southern African country of a little over two and a quarter million inhabitants is being overrun by elephants. In the mid-1990s, President Masisi …
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The whole world is worried about Africa, and with good reason. Late last year the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank approved a $34 billion debt relief package for 22 of what they classify as “heavily indebted poor countries”; …
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Last week, President Obama hosted the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. He welcomed over 40 African heads of state and their outsized entourages to what was a festive affair. Indeed, even the Ebola virus in West Africa failed to …
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The Wall Street Journal of August 31st carried an edifying op-ed by Kit Ramgopal and Matt Cooke. The title of their piece “Xanda the Lion Is Dead, but Trophy Hunting Helps His Kin” announces their thesis. That, as …
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Each year, I construct a Misery Index. The idea of such an index to measure economic misery was introduced by economist Art Okun in the 1960s as a way to provide President Lyndon Johnson with an easily digestible snapshot of …
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What do Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, and Nicolás Maduro have in common? Other than being leaders who kept the Communist Manifesto at their bedside, all three ushered in devastating hyperinflations.
Hyperinflations are rare. They have only occurred when the supply
Emmerson Mnangagwa, the new president of Zimbabwe, will have a hard time digging his country out of the economic hole that it fell into during the 37 years it was led by Robert Mugabe. But it can be done.
During
