Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme.  Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances.  Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the  November  entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...

What have been the biggest stories in business/financial news over the last year? Quite synchronistic of you to ask: I was just about to address the point.   Breaking the answers down by month as usual, is tricky this year, since one of the big stories -- involving Elon Musk and Twitter, seemed to pop up in headlines in every month from April onward. I've crammed all the twists and turns of that saga into the single April entry.    There are two other key things to know about this list before you dig in. First, it is a very U.S. centric list. More so than the earlier items in this series. Second, the war in Ukraine has left a big mark on it. Indeed, every item on the list that follows is either US based or Ukraine War related. There are s even of the former and five of the latter.  This selectivity is of course absurd. There was lots of rest-of-the-world finance news that had little to do with the Ukraine war. In the United Kingdom, for example, Liz Truss had ...

  The latest figures on inflation turned out poorly. Yes, gasoline prices have headed down but that has been overwhelmed in the rising numbers by increases elsewhere.  We're not back to 1970s-era figures yet. But it is worth mentioning that this administration has not been honest with us about inflation. Not by a long shot. Yes, Biden is not Trump and I am willing to cut him some polemical slack for that great merit. Further, under Biden's administration there appears to be a real chance Trump will be quite deservedly indicted. More slack.  Still, this is a "normal politics" issue. And I have to say, the administration has not been straight with us.  Early on it said there was no inflation, just a transitory blip in prices. As the blips continued and increased, the Biden line become: this is all Putin's fault.  What Putin did was wage a war against a neighboring country, leading to sanctions, leading to the cut off of pipeline supplies to western Europe. That in...