Essays & News

Working Paper Series. Written by David Howden. Canonical Austrian business cycle theory holds that a lower rate of interest lengthens the structure of production. Fillieule (2007) derives the opposite conclusion: the average period of production rises with the rate of interest. I argue in this article that the apparent conflict dissolves once two distinct meanings of lengthening […]

  The debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI), a policy in which the state provides a regular, unconditional sum of money to all citizens, is far from new. It periodically returns to the limelight every few years, discussed vigorously for a few months before slipping back into irrelevance after the idea is dismantled as unworkable, […]

  Global debt reached alarming new heights in 2025. Worldwide debt – public, corporate and household – increased by nearly $29 trillion to approximately $350 trillion, bringing the global debt-to-GDP ratio above 300 percent. Nearly two-thirds of that increase came from advanced economies, driven primarily by government deficit spending. The trend has worsened in 2026. At the […]

  Elections are supposed to change things. And in one sense, they do: when a populist government loses power, the rhetoric changes almost overnight. The speeches shift in tone, the enemy-of-the-people framing disappears, and international observers breathe a collective sigh of relief. But rhetoric is not policy. And policy, it turns out, is far stickier […]

  The conflict in the Middle East and the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have sent shockwaves through global gas markets. Before the war, around a fifth of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade transited through the strait, largely from Qatar, the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after the United States. The first […]