EconoSpeak

The Washington Post has over the last 7 days published a detailed account based on many secret documents they have spent years obtaining to provide an accurate account of what has happened during what is now the longest war the US has been engaged in.  It is an impressive account, which I have tried to follow, although with finishing a semester I did not read every word ot it. But it is a serious and important serious series, just reaching its conclusion today, along with lots of commentary...

Richard Nixon resigned as president after the House Judiciary Committee recommended he  be impeached, the vote that just happened yesterday for President Trump.  In the case of Nixon that vote was followed by a famous visit from three poerful GOP senators, including Barry Goldwater, who informed Nixon that he had lost the support of the GOP in the Senate.  Of course now we have the GOP Senate Majority Leader McConnell going on Sean Hannity to promise that Trump will not be convicted and that...

Probably not, but maybe.The basic problem is that Trump has long wanted t beat up on other nations in a trade war, but now he is getting impeached and he needs positive news, and the stock markets like word that he is making trade deals. So now we get trade deals, but it is all sort of a mess.So there are two matters here. One involves China, discussed in a new post here by pgl, which I shall comment on later. But my quick take on it is that he has made essentially similar proclamations in...

How gullible is Reuters? China will likely hit $50 billion in purchases of U.S. agricultural products, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday after earlier announcing that he would roll back scheduled tariffs on Chinese imports as Washington and Beijing finalized an initial trade deal. That was their opening paragraph. Fortune had a different take: The Markets Have Spoken: Phase One Trade Deal Between the U.S. and China Is “No Victory” - From Shanghai to London, stocks rallied on...

I have been watching the later stages of the still-ongoing House  Judiciary Comm hearing on impeaching Trump.  I have seen Republicans repeatedly ranting on about how this is an effort to undo the "popular election" of Trump, the will of the "63 million" who voted for Trump.Really, how dumb are these people? Hillary had three million more than Trump, 66 million.  He was not the popular winner.  What a joke.Of course impeachment is explicitly an undoing of an election result.  The person...

This is about the now late Paul Volcker, but I shall come in from an odd and particular persprctive. Upfront, I did meet the late Paul Volcker several times, although never in an official situation.  Much of "inside" stuff I shall say comes from others.I do not know the details of the Fed prior to the 1970s, but at least as of the Chairmanship of Milton Friedman's major prof, Arthur Burns, who capitulated to the  demands of Nixon for his 1972 reelection,  But it was clear that Burns was...

The United States became a net foreign debtor in 1985.  With current account deficits every year since that net foreign indebtedness has steadily increased since, reaching a reported total of -$10.56 trillioin as of Sept. 30 this year, a substantial total.However, while many have long predicted that this mounting net foreign indebtedness would eventually lead to the US having also having a net negative capital income flow, it has not happened.  In 1985 when the US initially into net...

Dick Cheney lied a lot so I guess his daughter feels compelled to do the same: So I would just ask people to remember that they have failed despite the fact that they had a process that basically put everything tilted in their direction. The Democrats were able to act as judge and prosecutor. The Democrats were able to select every single witness. The Democrats were able to prevent, and did prevent, witnesses from answering Republican questions. The Democrats decided what the American...

I should probably not waste time on this, but I was a fan of Kamala Harris, and her ending her candidacy while still in fifth  place in the polls, if in a long slide, has me disappointed.  As it is, given her declining polls, lack of money, and reportedly internally divided campaign staff, there, her chances of actually getting the nomination had falle n to effectively zero.   It is actually an act of class on her part to get of the overly crowded Dem field.In light of  the recent sharp...

Jeffrey Frankel has a must read blog over at Econbrowser: The “bicycle theory” used to be a metaphor for international trade policy. Just as standing still on a bicycle is not an option — one has to keep moving forward or else the bike will fall over – so it was said that international trade negotiators must continue to engage in successive rounds of liberalization, or else the open global trading system would be pulled down by protectionist interests. I don’t know if the theory was ever...