Don Luskin

Whether you look at it as a fundamental investor, a value investor or a technical investor, the market is getting ready to take a turn for the better. Let's start with fundamentals. All the evidence shows that the economy is gradually improving -- there's not a hint...

I have to strongly disagree with Mickey Kaus and Daniel Drezner -- both have recently argued that it would be to President Bush's realpolitikal advantage to delay the war against Iraq, and start it closer to the 2004 election. Kaus in Slate (2/28/2003) says "...the...

Warren Buffett is warning that derivative securities are a "mega-catastrophe" and "financial weapons of mass destruction" in the sneak preview of this year's annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, published in the latest Fortune: [T]hese instruments call...

It's almost painfully clich

I respectfully differ with my fellow New York Times-watchdog Andrew Sullivan, who says today "Good for the Times for correcting the record." He's giving them Good Journalism brownie points for a story reporting that former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay may well have had...

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing advocacy group, has collected the signatures of 400 economists -- including 10 Nobel prize winners -- on a statement opposing President Bush's tax cuts. It is running this week as a full-page advertisement in the New York...

Gold traded above $370 per ounce at the end of last month, for the first time in six years. Anxiety about war with Iraq has no doubt contributed to gold's surge -- but a look at history suggests that gold may be telling us as much about Alan Greenspan as it is about...

My previous columns here have been about President Bush's bold tax-cut proposal -- how it will help the economy grow, and how some of the criticisms of it are wrong. Today's column sets those issues aside and looks at the simple short-term impact that the plan would...

In science, you start with a hypothesis. Then you conduct an experiment to see if your hypothesis is true. If the experiment proves the hypothesis wrong, you throw it out and come up with a new hypothesis based on what you've learned. I guess economics must not be a...

I haven't been much of a fan of the proposal to eliminate taxes on dividend income. But a new wrinkle in the Bush administration's tax plan is making a believer out of me. What our growth-challenged economy needs most right now is a cut in capital-gains taxes, to spur...

The shake-up of the Bush economic team has been the occasion for a lot of criticism of the administration's domestic leadership. Indeed, I've been one of the harshest critics. Yet I think the Bush administration has done one thing very, very right when it comes to...

The New York Times reveals its deep anti-capitalism bias even when it purports to offer a little op-ed space to dissenting views. After a week of relentlessly demagoguing the Bush administrations tax plan as a subsidy to "the rich" -- both in editorials and in what...

A year ago I told investors to sell technology stocks and reinvest in long-term Treasury bonds. That bet turned out very well on both sides: The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index is down more than 30% in 2002 while the total return for 10-year Treasurys has been about 18%...

There's a big tax debate coming, with President Bush scheduled to announce a package of new tax cuts today. And it looks like we're not going to be able to talk about it without falling into the morass of politically correct speech. I'm not talking about the usual...

I remember as a child eagerly awaiting Time magazine's choice of its Man of the Year each year. I believed that there were great men and great events in the world that I needed to know about, and that there was a great arbiter of them -- Time -- that somehow make the...

Newspapers are supposed to report the news -- facts -- so that people can use those facts when they form their opinions. But where do newspapers get facts? How do reporters know that what they are reporting is true? How do readers know? These questions are most...

Newspapers are supposed to report the news -- facts -- so that people can use those facts when they form their opinions. But where do newspapers get facts? How do reporters know that what they are reporting is true? How do readers know? These questions are most...

If you're a financial media pundit, you live every day with a fundamental challenge with respect to accountability and intellectual honesty. As your forecasts, opinions and views accumulate over the years, how do you reconcile what you are saying today (or failing to...

What is "economic analysis" when it comes from a newspaper? It's usually just like Daniel Altman's "Economic Analysis" column in the New York Times this morning: a montage of sound-bites from "experts" (or, if not experts -- are there really any "experts" in the...

There's been a lot of tough talk about how "tainted" Wall Street stock research is -- and what should be done about analyst recommendations influenced by investment-banking fees and other conflicts of interest. It's an important question of business ethics, legal...