Essays & News

  Investment “dark pools” have been at the center of a lengthy controversy, attracting much criticism and numerous calls for regulatory clampdowns. These private trading venues where large institutional investors execute orders outside public exchanges, more often than not with minimal oversight and without public attention, have frequently been described as opaque, destabilizing and unfair. […]

Introduction The UK government’s November 2025 Budget supplied ample corroboration of our report published by IREF in October 2025 (‘the report’), showing that the governing Labour Party plans to greatly expand the state’s direction of the UK economy.1 The means-of-control will be a decade-long programme of spending on Net Zero, industry, and infrastructure, partially funded […]

  The task of the economist is not merely, as in equilibrium theory, to examine the logical consistency of various modes of action, but to make human action intelligible, to let us understand the nature of the logical structure called “plans” to exhibit the successive modes of thought which give rise to successive modes of […]

  Ukraine is approaching its fourth year of war. The conflict is now only four months short of lasting as long as World War I. The Ukrainian people and government have fought bravely, showed resilience, tactical competence and were in many respects successful. Russia, however, remains stronger and has greater resources. Support from the West, […]

  During the post-Cold War period, unilateral sanctions were often used by the United States to impose economic costs on adversaries. These measures were also meant to influence and shape the foreign or domestic policy behavior of weaker states to reinforce Washington’s unipolar status. However, since 2022, and arguably even earlier, unilateral sanctions regimes began […]