Don Luskin

We're facing an important inflection point in the stock market. And as always happens at such critical times, investors are likely to get bamboozled by misinformation that they get from the mainstream media. I'm going to try to straighten some of that out. All eyes...

Lord knows where these things come from or how they get started. Another one of those emails is making the rounds -- the kind that everyone seems to get and forward on to everyone they know, so you end up getting a dozen copies of it. So maybe you've already seen this...

Let's dig deeper into the bull-versus-bear debate that has dominated my last few columns. I've taken the bullish position -- but I'm not rabid about it, and I've discussed the things that worry me, too. I've gotten tons of email from readers along the way -- mostly...

The financial press is grave-dancing on Microsoft's decision to no longer award stock options to employees -- and instead to award shares of stock itself. A Wall Street Journal column by Jessie Eisenger crows "Microsoft, once the bullying monopolist, is trying to...

Even my old friends have turned against me! As the angry emails continue to pour in from bearish readers who are furious at me for my last couple of bullish columns, my old friend Fred Goodman -- the master technical analyst -- has issued a major sell signal. I don't...

When President Bush first announced his plan last January to cut taxes on dividends, capital gains and personal income I sang his praises (first here, here and also here and here). Now Bush's plan has been law for over two months. While the critics have had no...

I have an idea for Eliot Spitzer. As you know, the New York state attorney general has been crusading against stock research tainted by investment-banking relationships. He has fined Wall Street billions and ruined the careers of superstar analysts. So why doesn't he...

Speech by Donald L. Luskin given at the Russell 20-20 Association Annual Meeting, May 7, 2003 I earn my living as an economist. I try to forecast how economic policies and ideas in the hands of government, business, media and academia move the world and move markets....

Earlier this month, William Bennett -- the high-profile Republican "morality" advocate -- was outed in the media as a big-time gambler, a high-roller who made and lost millions in the casinos. There was the usual tempest in the public teapot, with Democrats attacking...

President Bush's proposal to eliminate the double taxation on dividends was simple, moral, and innocent -- a lot like Jefferson Smith, the James Stewart character in Frank Capra's classic film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And just like Smith, Bush's proposal got...

Ah, the beloved Warren Buffett. He's the second richest man in the world according to Forbes, and he's America's self-appointed corporate virtue czar, the Bill Bennett of the executive suite. He's the one whose folksy Berkshire Hathaway Corporation annual reports...

Yesterday's market drop had the odor of an all-too-familiar panic about it. Once again, it feels as if the fragile fabric of policy stability in the Bush administration is threatening to unravel -- as if we're headed toward another "constitutional crisis" of the type...

With today's meeting of the FOMC not likely to generate a lot of surprises, let's take a moment to look at a chart that offers a remarkable perspective on monetary history. One wants to be careful about taking this kind of analysis too literally, but it is...

If President Bush and his team want a great argument to support their proposed elimination of the unfair double taxation of dividends and retained earnings, they should look to an excellent column in the "Week In Review" section of last month's New York Times. That's...

Last week I sat across a table from President George W. Bush in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He told me and a dozen fellow economists that "the American economy is a theatre in the war on terrorism." With steely conviction he told us that he intends to win...

It's back to last December 31, and we're playing a New Year's Eve guessing game. The country is heading for recession and war -- so what will the stock market do in the first quarter of the new year? If I told you that Amazon.com and Yahoo! would break out to highs...

Let's talk about the economics of mass destruction -- the single most dangerous idea in economic policy... the Phillips Curve. Even if you don't know it by that name, you've been its victim. The Phillips Curve is the formal construct representing the idea that full...

The Senate's surprise vote Tuesday to reduce the value of President Bush's proposed tax-cuts by more than half has been played in the press as a major setback for the President's agenda. But the way I see it, it's actually great news: a tax-cut that was assumed to...

If you hoped that Alan Greenspan's congressional testimony last month would help cut through the thick fog of competing opinion on President Bush's tax-cut plan, you were probably bitterly disappointed. Greenspan proved once again, in my opinion, that he's the world's...

When antitrust cases are about complex technical subjects like Microsoft and the market for PC operating systems, or Hughes/Echostar and the market for satellite TV broadcasting, it's easy just to throw up your hands and assume that the government's experts must be...

We may be facing an unusual moment in the history of market valuations in which both risk and expected returns are on the rise at the same time -- and unfortunately, at the moment risk is winning. Clearly, fears of the domestic consequences of possible war with Iraq...