Don Luskin

At the top of the late great bull market in 2000 investors kept coming up with reasons why stocks weren’t really overpriced. I came up with a few juicy theories myself that will live forever in the Rationalizations Hall of Fame. But now, in the bowels of the...

The August 14th deadline for CEO’s and CFO’s of America’s largest 947 companies to certify their financial statements has come and gone without incident. There have been no significant or unexpected earnings restatements, and virtually every company...

Earlier this year big institutional investors were blithely telling themselves that Enron was just an exception. After all, it was a case of outright fraud. How often does that happen? And sure, every company cooks the books a little. But we expect it of them and make...

There’s a game of “can you top this?” going on, with the Senate, the House, and the White House all trying to one-up each other to see who can talk the toughest tough-talk about corporate crooks. The media sits on the sidelines, egging on the...

As of yesterday’s close, the S&P 500 has lost 46.2% on a total return basis (including receipt of dividends) since the top in 2000. That exceeds the loss of 45.1% in the 1973-74 bear market — but it’s still shy of the 49.9% lost in the 1937-38...

A seasoned Silicon Valley businessman — an older man of the pre-dotcom generation who’s seen his fair share of booms and busts — once told me that he had discovered the fatal weakness of the technology industry. It is that semiconductors are the most...

WorldCom has rallied as much as 53% in the two weeks since it was ignominiously ejected from the S&P 500 Index on May 14. Low-priced securities of distressed companies are often subject to such large moves in percentage terms. But WorldCom’s rally following...

Standard & Poor’s announced this week that it’s taking the revolutionary step of including the expense of employee stock options when it calculates companies’ operating earnings. This is revolutionary because current accounting rules don’t...

The best reasons for the current era of high equity valuations aren’t very good. Just a few weeks before the great stock market crash of 1929, America’s first celebrity economist, Irving Fisher, made one of history’s worst market calls when he said,...

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I alienated some friends and clients when I e-mailed a TrendMacro Live! note last week warning of a dangerous new phase of the Enron scandal. Everyone is understandably eager to round up the bad guys and hang

In the wake of the Enron scandal, investors are all of a sudden focusing intensely on the integrity of corporate accounting. So self-righteous pundits and politicians are elbowing each other for space at the head of the lynch mob demanding new regulations to enforce...

The failure of Enron has had important impacts for its shareholders, creditors and business counterparties. There will be some important second-order impacts, too. Enron has already become an excuse for politicians and special interest groups to seek useless and...

The biotech sector is sick. The industry that promises to cure cancer and AIDS can’t cure itself. And it’s all so sudden. All last year I thought favorably of biotech as a “defensive growth” sector — a group of high-risk/high-reward...

When the stock market soared in the first two weeks of this new year, it seemed to validate a growing confidence that the economy was destined to overcome the tech-wreck and the recession, just as America had moved beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11....

This commentary continues a series intended to address some of the misconceptions in the flurry of recent media reports about deflation. My last commentary (“Deflation: The Basics”) began by defining deflation as strictly a monetary process, and one that...

Deflation is not falling prices. Deflation is not economic contraction. Deflation is when the Fed screws up. The idea of deflation has gotten more play in the press over the last two weeks than it has over the last ten years — thanks to unusual negative readings...

Iconoclastic economists have been warning of deflation for almost five years, based on subtle signs that Alan Greenspan hasn’t been supplying enough liquidity to meet the needs of the U.S. economy. And now — finally — these warnings have come true in...

Arthur Laffer’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2001) will set supply-side tongues wagging — or more likely, supply-side teeth gnashing. The upshot is: Laffer is endorsing the idea of a 10-day federally underwritten suspension of state...

I live up a narrow, one-lane private road that winds up a steep, wooded canyon in Northern California. A couple years ago, during the El Nino winter that dropped record rains here, a side of the canyon collapsed and a massive mudslide closed the road. Heading uphill...

Like one of those football mascots — a poor, sweaty guy dressed up in a giant fuzzy costume of a shark or an eagle (or whatever his team’s symbol is) — Paul Krugman is dancing and clowning around in the field and among the fans trying to whip up...

That’s what John Galt, the individualist hero of the novel Atlas Shrugged , — Ayn Rand’s great celebration of laissez-faire capitalism — said to the federal bureaucrats. And there’s no better message to send to Washington today....