Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Trump Invites China to Hack His Emails—and Uncover All the Details of His Business Ties to Russian Oligarchs. Cool!

Well, by now y’all know that Donald Trump held a press conference today at which he invited Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server and retrieve the 33,000 emails she deleted.  When questioned about the propriety of encouraging anyone—much less a foreign power—to commit cybertheft, he said Russia probably already had the emails and […]

What Bill and Hillary Clinton Don’t Get: That the way to win Rust Belt white blue-collar voters isn’t to go centrist; it’s to go economic populist.

The changes to the platform testify to the strength of the Sanders campaign, and, like that campaign, they are a sign that the dynamism within the party arises right now from its left­wing faction, led by politicians like Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. What is less clear is if Mrs. Clinton is […]

The Road to Trumpdom

I always Google my headline ideas to try to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. I was thinking of the title for this post as I was looking at a cartoon adaptation of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, originally published by Look magazine in 1945 and subsequently distributed in the 1950s as a pamphlet by the General Motors […]

I’m with Brian Fallon

Campaigns are complicated things. No one gets every piece of them right. Some candidates are great at big rallies. Some are good only at small events. Some are terrific TV communicators but bad on the stump. Some delegate well, and others don’t. Some never waver from a message, while others can’t seem to find one […]

The most important endorsement of Clinton other than Sanders’ and Warren’s came today … from Al Gore

Paul Waldman has a lengthy post today at the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog titled “Despite what you’ve heard, Democrats aren’t in disarray. Their party is under attack from the outside.”   He argues that the Democratic Party itself isn’t that divided, and that the divisions really are between Democrats and the outsider Sanders supporters who […]

Exponential Decay of Inflation

Yesterday, I wrote about the connection between inflation and corporate profits. (link) I posted this graph. (quarterly data since 1958 to 1st quarter 2016) The graph shows how inflation drops as net corporate profits rise. Net corporate profit rate = Corporate profits/GDP – nominal interest rate The trend line (bright red curving downward) implies an […]

Trump’s Son inLaw’s paper says Putin Hacked DNC to help Trump

This is genuinely amazing (h/t @jbarro) http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-dismantling-of-dnc-is-clear-attack-by-putin-on-clinton/ New York Observer is a weekly newspaper… . Since July 2006, the paper has been owned and published by the American real‑estate figure Jared Kushner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Observerqqq I quote without comment It’s no secret that the DNC was recently subject to a major hack, one which independent cybersecurity experts […]