The Ultimate Solution Yes, Trump really said that. The Syrian Kurds, who have been where they are about to be ethnically cleansed out of, are welcoming “the ultimate solution,” just like Jews in you know where were welcoming “the final solution.” Of course they must accept this because they are “no angels,” “communists,” and “worse […]
An Increasingly Divergent US Economy Lots of people have been huffing and puffing about whether or not the US economy will go into a recession in the near future, with Menzie Chinn and Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser saying it is now about 50-50 whether or not the US economy will go into recession by the […]
Eeeeeeeeemoluments And How Bad Bruce Springsteen Is I have almost never watched through a Trump speech to one of his rallies, but I was curious what he would say at the first one after the impeachment inquiry officially started, which he held a few days ago in Minneapolis, supposedly trying to take MN away from […]
Closing The Open Skies Trump’s stonewalling on impeachment is the top story, snore. Lower down and more important is Trump allowing Turkey to attack the Kurds in Syria with the support of Russia. Even GOP senators do not like this and ISIS fighters may get out. But, heck, those will go to Europe, and unlike […]
The Repo Ruckus This is now about three weeks old news, but it is increasingly clear that it is not clear why it happened or if it will happen again. There was an outbreak of completely unexpected volatility in the repo market, where in the past the Fed had carried out open market operations, although […]
Why Is Iraq Blowing Up Now? Yes, Iraq. It has not made front page headlines with so much else going on, but over the last several days there has been an escalating series of protests against corruption in various parts of Iraq and culminating yesterday in Baghdad with one being met by soldiers firing openly […]
Peoples’ Republic of China Reaches Age 70 While most US media claims China (PRC) has the world’s second largest economy, that is only true as measured in nominal terms. Measured in real PPP terms, Chinese GDP surpassed that of the US in 2015 and continees to move further ahead of it (and is likely to […]
The New US-Japan Trade Agreement Lost in the shuffle this past week was one piece of good news for Trump: a tentative trade deal with Japan that he and Japan’s PM Shinzō Abe signed in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting. While it is largely a favorable deal, it does […]
Country Music I have been watching Ken Burns’s “Country Music” series on PBS. May not watch too much more of it as I am not that interested in more recent country music, although I like some of it. So the big story of this series is how much of supposedly “white music” is of African-American […]
The Strike On Saudi Oil Facilities This is going to be a tentative post because there is much that remains unclear. What I am going to do is to make it clear that stories that are being told by US authorities and largely repeated by the MSM with little critical commentary is highly questionable. As […]