“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months." -Yale Economist Irving Fisher, 12 days before the 1929 stock market crash. Unless you live in a belljar, you have certainly heard of the term cryptocurrency—or at least of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is today’s rage: the seminal digital currency has put in a dizzying run, gaining more than 300,000% in only the last seven years. If you had purchased $10 worth of Bitcoin in July 2010, your investment would command $705,217 as of this writing. In 2017 alone, Bitcoin’s price has almost sextupled. The upward trend in Bitcoin has been replicated by other cryptocurrencies, some of which have had equally enormous surges in only the past year. Expectedly, Bitcoin’s rise has divided investors and finan...
In recent years, discourse on sovereign debt has primarily focused on the Eurozone and- to a lesser extent- the United States of America. Unbeknownst to many, however, a much more severe fiscal crisis has been brewing on the opposite side of the globe. Japan is today the most heavily indebted country on the planet in both absolute and relative terms. With a debt burden equivalent to 240% of G.D.P., and a debt-servicing burden that takes up more than 25% of all public spending, Japan’s number is clearly up. Japan has been enmeshed in economic dislocation for a quarter century; every attempt to jumpstart the economy has been fair-to-middling in success. Every Japanese citizen now owes in excess of $100,000. To put this into context, if a sum equivalent to Japan’s public debt was divided evenly among Kenya’s 44 million people, each one of us would receive close to sh. 26,000,000. But how did Japan get...