End Of The Obama-Yellen Economy For the past year the US has been essentially operating on an Obama-Yellen economy, at least as far as the big macroeconomic policies have been concerned in terms of fiscal and monetary policies. We saw basically a continuation of what had been seeing in previous years, steady growth with inflation […]
Distractions, Distractions Wow! We have a great controversy! A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media. A constitutional crisis! Egad! In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing. But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously […]
Is Treasury Secretary Mnuchin Right About The Impact Of The Dollar On US Trade? Maybe yes. In Davos some days ago Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declared that a lower valued dollar would lead to a lower US trade deficit. The dollar promptly fell several percents and various persons and many observers reacted in horror, most prominently […]
Parsing the Poland Problem Paradox: Local Versus National Outcomes As argued in numerous posts here, we have seen an apparently emerging disconnect between economic conditions and political outcomes in a variety of nations, with anti-immigrant or more generally nationalist or populist parties with authoritarian tendencies gaining strength in many nations despite apparently improving or even […]
Is Trump’s Washing Machine Tariff To Punish South Korea For Being Too Friendly With North Korea? I have seen nobody claim this, and this may simply be a matter of collateral damage, as Trump has officially approved of the recent openings related to the forthcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea, especially since South Korean President […]
Are Voters In Nations With A Poland Problem Especially Sophisticated? The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political outcomes. It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the […]
A Reminder That It Was George W. Bush Who Was Responsible For Letting North Korea Get Nuclear Weapons Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution has provided a link to a 2004 article from Washington Monthly by Fred Kaplan that lays out in great detail how George W. Bush, strongly backed by Cheney and Rumsfeld and against the views […]
Does the United States Have A “Poland Problem”? It certainly looks like it. Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a “Poland problem” involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially “populist” nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory […]
How Trump Killed The Anti-Government Protests In Iran By very strongly and publicly supporting them and dragging the matter to the UN Security Council Of course, his supporters have been praising his “strong action” in comparison with Obama’s quiet approach to the 2009 demonstrations, meant to reduce accusations of the demonstraters being US pawns. Those […]
Does Iran Have A “Poland Problem”? Maybe somewhat, but not as much as Poland does, with a “Poland problem” being where a well performing economy does not prevent political unhappiness. Iran is experiencing massive demonstrations that are heavily driven by economic complaints, even though economic performance has improved since the adoption and approval of the […]