Don Luskin

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 require that options...

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, "Stock prices have...

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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 technology companies that are...

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 is solely in...

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 in...

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 the form of...

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 sales tax....

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 martial enthusiasm,...

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. That's what the market is saying in...

A report Tuesday from Steve Galbraith, strategist at Morgan Stanley, slashed his 2001 earnings forecast for the S&P 500 from $51 to $46 -- about a 10% cut. But from the 1092 S&P close the day before the September 11 terrorist attack through the 1003 close last...

What will happen if calling Tuesday's attack an "act of war" ends up being more than an evocative metaphor? What if it really turns out to be just the first battle in a prolonged global conflict? What if it turns out to be -- not to be overly dramatic here, folks, but...

What inspiring, bullish news. It's the dawn of a great new era. I can feel my animal spirits rising. That's right. Didn't you feel the same way yesterday when you heard that the Department of Justice wouldn't seek the break-up of Microsoft? Doesn't it just make you...

Hewlett Packard buying Compaq isn't exactly going to save the world. If that's the best thing this market can come up with as a catalyst, we're in a heap of trouble. About the only good thing you can say about the market right now is that the major indices have not...