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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 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
Steve H. Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is a Senior Fellow and Director of
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
