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Javier E

Marginal Revolution: Did France cause the Great Depression? - 0 views

www.marginalrevolution.com/...ause-the-great-depression.html

great depression france deflation gold

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The gold standard was a key factor behind the Great Depression, but why did it produce such an intense worldwide deflation and associated economic contraction?
  • France increased its share of world gold reserves from 7 percent to 27 percent between 1927 and 1932 and effectively sterilized most of this accumulation. This “gold hoarding” created an artificial shortage of reserves and put other countries under enormous deflationary pressure.
  • The results indicate that France was somewhat more to blame than the United States for the worldwide deflation of 1929-33.
Javier E

This Time, It Really Is Different - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...me-it-really-is-different.html

slowdown economic policy deflation infrastructure debt Japan US

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Nouriel Roubini, whose consistently bearish views have been consistently right
  • “The Way Forward” ought to at least give our politicians pause.
  • its prognosis, if we continue on the current path, is grim. “Unless we take dramatic steps, it will be Japan all over again,” says Alpert. “Continuous deflation, no economic growth, in and out of recessions. And high unemployment.” Adds Hockett: “It will be like the economic version of chronic fatigue syndrome. A low-grade fever all the time.”
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  • the bursting of the debt bubble three years ago was not just a severe example of the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of American capitalism. Rather, it was the ultimate consequence of the modern global economy. Chief among the changes that have taken place is the integration of China, Russia, India and other countries into the global economic mainstream. The developed world once had maybe 500 million workers. Today, say the authors, we’ve added another two billion people to the global work force. That change alone has had a great deal to do with the stagnant wages, income inequality and the oversupply of labor in America that was masked by rising home prices and access to credit.
  • they believe that this is perhaps the best time in recent history for the government to take on a sustained infrastructure program, lasting from five to seven years, to create jobs and demand. “Labor costs will never be lower,” says Hockett. “Equipment costs will never be lower. The cost of capital will never be lower. Why wait?” Their plan calls for $1.2 trillion in spending — not all by the government, but all overseen by government — that would add 5.2 million jobs each year of the program.
  • Reducing government spending in the short term will only make things worse.
  • Now that the curtain has been pulled back, cheap credit alone can’t fix our problems. The country is in a deflationary cycle that is very difficult to get out of: as wages decrease (or more workers become unemployed), people become afraid to spend. Assets like homes drop in value. Businesses react by lowering prices and laying off yet more workers — which only triggers a new round of deflation. The only thing that doesn’t change is the unsustainably high debt that was accrued during the bubble.
  • they call for a “global rebalancing,” which includes a radical change in the current dysfunctional relationship between creditor and debtor nations, and even a new global currency that would be administered by the International Monetary Fund.
Javier E

The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384034

economic history WWI WWII international financial US relations foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.
  • The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.
  • “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,
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  • what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”
  • as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States
  • His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.
  • That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe
  • But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.
  • His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.
  • Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,
  • It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.
  • Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”
  • Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,
  • What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”
  • And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”
  • The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.
  • Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.
  • “By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).
  • the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.
  • Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.
  • Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.
  • But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.
  • Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered
  • But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels
  • James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.
  • When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.
  • Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.
  • The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.
  • But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.
  • American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.
  • Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
  • The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers
  • “If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.
  • From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”
  • Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.
  • That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.
  • On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.
  • The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.
  • t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative
Javier E

Putting Economic Data Into Context - The New York Times - 1 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ing-economic-data-into-context

economic data context historical analysis history

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • economic historians have been wrestling with this problem for years and have produced an excellent calculator for converting historical data into contemporary figures. The site is called Measuring Worth,
  • Today we use price indexes to convert monetary values from the past into “real” values today. The best-known such index is the Consumer Price Index published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For those interested only in a simple inflation adjustment, the bureau maintains a useful calculator.
  • The area where this is the biggest problem is probably large budget numbers. The raw data is almost universally useless. Saying that the budget deficit was $680.3 billion in fiscal year 2013 tells the average person absolutely nothing of value. It’s just a large number that sounds scary. It would help to at least know that it is down from $1.087 trillion in 2012 and a peak of $1.413 trillion in 2009, but that’s not entirely adequate.
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  • it makes no sense to compare the federal budget to a family budget, which is what the Consumer Price Index is based on. One needs to use a broader index, like the gross domestic product deflator, which measures price changes throughout the entire economy.
  • For large numbers, the percentage of the gross domestic product is both the easiest to find and best to use.
  • Since the “burden” of the debt basically falls on the entire economy, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio is generally considered the best measure of that burden. It also facilitates international comparisons without having to worry about exchange-rate adjustments.
  • international price comparisons can be especially tricky because current market exchange rates may not accurately reflect relative values or standards of living. Economists generally prefer to use something called “purchasing power parity,” but such data is not always easy to come by
  • There is much more to say on this topic. I recommend an essay on the Measuring Worth website that discusses different measures of value over time and how they materially affect our perceptions. There are also new statistical measures coming online that may provide even better data, like the Billion Prices Project from M.I.T., which gathers price data in real time directly from store price scanners.
  • This is an area where trial and error is the best strategy. The important thing is to make an effort to provide proper context where it appears necessary and not to simply ignore the problem.
qkirkpatrick

Poland's Central Bank Slashes Rates to Combat Deflation Risk - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...mbat-deflation-risk-1425474535

poland economics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Poland’s central bank slashed its main interest rate by 50 basis points to 1.50%, the lowest on record, in response to persistent declines in consumer prices.
  • The Polish rate cut is the latest in a series of easing measures by central banks across Europe, following the European Central Bank’s decision in late January to launch a program of quantitative easing, under which it will buy more than €1 trillion ($1.12 trillion) of mostly government bonds by September 2016.
  • . The central bank’s target is an inflation rate of 2.5%.
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  • The Polish currency’s weakness after the rate cut is likely to be temporary, said Piotr Matys, emerging markets strategist at Rabobank in London
Javier E

Economic history: What can we learn from the Depression? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...economic-history-0

policy history depression financial system wall street economics stimulus protectionism crashcri crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Can economic historians give policy-makers advice on the basis of what they believed caused the Great Depression? A discussion of this topic by Britain’s top economic historians in a lecture at Cambridge University on November 4th suggested the question is more complex than it first appears
  • what has made producing lessons more difficult is that many traditional views about the causes of the Depression have been overturned by academics in recent decades.
  • Although the rise of protectionism increased the velocity and depth of the depression when tariffs started rising in 1930, they were still only responsible for part of the fall in world GDP during the Depression
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  • The idea that the Wall Street crash caused the depression has also gone out of favour in recent years.
  • As with the rise of protectionism, it seems that the Wall Street crash was a symptom of problems in the global economy, rather than the underlying cause of them.
  • Economic historians now focus on a different candidate to take the blame for the sudden economic collapse of the 1930s: the structure of the world financial system before 1929. In particular, the work of the economic historians such as Mr Eichengreen and Peter Temin has recently stressed the importance of the malfunctioning of the gold standard currency system as the cause of the Depression, as well as its severity.
  • This system came to a head when the global economy started what, at first, seemed to be a very ordinary business cycle downturn in the late-1920s. When the drop in global demand caused balance-of-payments crises in countries around the world due to gold outflows, they were forced to use fiscal and monetary means to deflate their economies to protect the fixed value of their currencies (they also resorted to tariffs).This amplified the recession into a depression.
  • According to some monetarist historians, the four waves of banking crises in the 1930-33 period that bankrupted half of America’s banks were caused by the Federal Reserve tightening monetary policy in response to gold outflows.
  • According to research by Mr Eichengreen, countries that escaped the gold standard and changed to floating exchange rates first, such as Britain in 1931 and America in 1933, tended to recover earlier and far faster. The critique of monetary policy as a conduit of Depression dates back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's "Monetary History of the United States", first published in 1963
  • Policy-makers have drawn some lessons from the 1930s. Unlike in the Depression, central banks in Britain and America avoided unnecessary monetary tightening. Instead, they slashed interest rates and used unconventional monetary stimulus such as quantitative easing in an effort to fend off deflation (a scourge of the Depression). The role of banking crises in turning a normal recession into a deep depression has also been recognised. Governments pulled out the stops to prevent the Lehman failure from generating a global financial meltdown, keenly aware of the role of financial contagion in the 1930s. 
  • lessons from the Great Depression for Europe's current problems may be more difficult to discern than one might assume. The euro zone is a fixed-exchange-rate system, with elements similar to those of the gold standard. But the political and economic constraints holding back policy-makers are different from those that prevailed in the 1930s. Economists now say that the higher level of financial integration in Europe today makes leaving the euro-zone a much riskier prospect than was leaving the gold standard was back in the 1930s. And the euro zone has a central bank that can print euros—something the gold-standard system lacked.
  • Perhaps economic historians can make a better contribution by ensuring the past is not abused in debates about modern-day crises. For instance, putting all the blame on Wall Street for the Great Depression—or on bankers in the current crisis—does not stand up to historical scrutiny. The responsibility may more properly lie in a complex combination of factors, like how global financial systems are structured. But this still needs be interpreted from modern day evidence rather than in over-simplistic “lessons” from the past
Javier E

From World War II, Economic Lessons for Today - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...conomic-lessons-for-today.html

wwII depression economics policy history employment

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?
  • While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.
  • Starting in the mid-1930s, Hitler’s aggression caused capital flight from Europe. People wanted to invest somewhere safer — particularly in the United States. Under the gold standard of that time, the flight to safety caused large gold flows to America. The Treasury Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that inflow to increase the money supply.
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  • The result was an aggressive monetary expansion that effectively ended deflation.
  • The economy responded strongly. From 1933 to 1937, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of almost 10 percent, and unemployment fell from 25 percent to 14. To put that in perspective, G.D.P. growth has averaged just 2.5 percent in the current recovery, and unemployment has barely budged.
  • The lesson here is that fiscal stimulus can help a depressed economy recover — an idea supported by new studies of the 2009 stimulus package. Additional short-run tax cuts or increases in government investment would help deal with our unemployment crisis.
  • What of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can do little if unemployment is caused by structural factors, like a mismatch between workers’ skills and available jobs
  • businesses and workers found a way to get the job done. Factories simplified production methods and housewives learned to rivet.
  • Here the lesson is that demand is crucial — and that jobs don’t go unfilled for long. If jobs were widely available today, unemployed workers would quickly find a way to acquire needed skills or move to where the jobs were located.
  • at the end of World War II, that ratio hit 109 percent — one and a half times as high as it is now. Yet this had no obvious adverse consequences for growth or our ability to borrow.
  • what about the national debt? Given the recent debt downgrade, it might seem impossible for the United States to embark on fiscal stimulus that would increase its ratio of debt to G.D.P.
  • Everyone understood then why the nation was racking up so much debt: we were fighting for survival, and for the survival of our allies. No one doubted that we would repay our debts. We had done it after every other war, and raising taxes even before the attack on Pearl Harbor showed our leaders’ fiscal resolve.
  • someone needs to explain to the nation and to world markets just why we must increase the debt in the short run. Unemployment of roughly 9 percent for 28 months and counting is a national emergency. We must fight it with the same passion and commitment we have brought to military emergencies in our past.
Javier E

Sundown in America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sundown-in-america.html

crisis US history economic failure bubble trends policy

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.
  • When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.
  • we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.
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  • The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.
  • The future is bleak. The greatest construction boom in recorded history — China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years — is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.
  • what’s at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices — a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation.
  • The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
  • All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
  • It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
  • It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
  • If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Made Russia's Hacking More Effective - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...511880

russia hacking election 2016 trump

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives. Otherwise, we learned from them that some people at the Democratic National Committee favored a lifelong Democrat for their party’s nomination over a socialist interloper who had joined the party for his own convenience. We learned that many Democrats, including Chelsea Clinton, disapproved of the ethical shortcomings of some of the people in Bill Clinton’s inner circle. We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.
  • Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.
Javier E

The Austerity Agenda - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-austerity-agenda.html

austerity deficit recession crisis rationale metaphor economics

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger
  • I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.
  • The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?
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  • The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.
  • So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.
  • these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.
  • there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.
  • when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”
  • The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.
  • So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.
  • The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.
Javier E

Book Review: 'The Deluge' by Adam Tooze - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eluge-by-adam-tooze-1416000347

Interwar international finance international relations international finance loan WWI wilson germany

shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The American Century, contends the historian Adam Tooze, began in 1916
  • In “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” Mr. Tooze identifies those struggles as the crucial moment when the Allies ran out of funds. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Reserve to block additional loans by J.P. Morgan & Co. that would have kept the Allies going, because nothing, in his view, justified further slaughter.
  • Perceiving minimal differences in the two sides’ war aims, Wilson first offered mediation and then called for “peace without victory.”
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  • He considers the president a hyper-nationalist, a hypocrite and a covert imperialist intoxicated by his own rhetoric. Wilson, he claims, aspired to global hegemony not militarily, as did Wilhelmine Germany, but through the imposition of a capitalist new order.
  • His formulary included industrial pre-eminence, preferential finance, an Open Door policy for trade everywhere, and a backward-looking presumption of white supremacy. That felicitous combination would at once maintain the peace and perpetuate American advantage.
  • Other nations, he believed, would necessarily shuffle along in an international “chain gang,” possessing the trappings but not the substance of sovereignty.
  • he seeks to elaborate an integrated planetary history. Trained in economics as well as history, he illuminates the interconnections between politics and finance. His geographical purview seems limitless.
  • Mr. Tooze sustains his argument through a close and often imaginative reading of the Wilson papers.
  • Wilson’s assertion of moral supremacy, he contends, finds roots in a “distinctive vision of America’s historic destiny” to which statesmen of both parties subscribed. Mr. Tooze expresses as much impatience with “strong-arm nationalists of the Teddy Roosevelt variety” as with Wilson. In short, both Democrats and Republicans sought to transform America into a “de facto super-state.”
  • The country’s failure to join the League of Nations after the war and its refusal to participate in European political affairs, even while it pulled the strings of international finance, made the “absent presence of US power” the defining characteristic of the 1920s
  • Wilson never changed his objective. At the 1919 peace conference he aimed at “the collective humbling of all the European powers.”
  • Mr. Tooze discerns an institutional problem here that goes deeper than the idiosyncrasies of politicians or voters’ naïveté. Americans clung to an obsolete Constitution, he maintains, a “vestigial thing” ill-suited to the modern world. Not until 1945 did the federal government acquire both the domestic tax resources and the power over international institutions necessary to properly exercise global hegemony.
  • When the European nations stopped payment on their debts in 1933, Congress passed a law forbidding loans to defaulting governments.
  • Once the U.S. joined the war, it lent to Great Britain, France and Italy some $10 billion (equivalent to $170 billion today) raised from U.S. citizens through the issue of “Liberty Bonds.” Britain had advanced a comparable sum but largely to czarist Russia and other polities unlikely to repay.
  • Since it could never collect on its own credit extensions, the U.K. pushed successive schemes to write down debts all around. The U.S. Treasury offered a brief moratorium in 1919 but thereafter summoned the borrowers to settle. The U.S. Debt Commission proved relatively generous, given adverse sentiment in the heartland
  • the sum required from London amounted to only 0.8% annually of British foreign investment.
  • Mr. Tooze nonetheless considers the British debt settlement outrageous, comparing its size to that of the U.K.’s national education budget or the sum needed to clear the country’s slums.
  • Mr. Tooze provides readers with additional graphic evidence of the subterranean animosity that characterized Anglo-American relations. He cites Wilson’s 1918 boast that if the British declined to limit their navy the U.S. would build a bigger one. In another bloody war, “England would be wiped off the face of the map.”
  • He sympathizes with the difficulties that Berlin governments encountered in the early 1920s and considers the notion of stabilizing the depreciating paper mark a chimera. As a result of the 1918 revolution, organized labor held effective veto power over tax and social policy. Nor could Weimar’s fractured society tolerate the level of unemployment that deflation would have imposed.
  • Under the circumstances, Mr. Tooze contends, the German government simply took the path of least resistance; it did not intentionally bring about the 1923 hyperinflation to undermine reparations.
Javier E

Martin Indyk Explains the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process - Uri Friedman - Th... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373922

israel negotiation peace

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Indyk somehow retains hope for a peace deal. For all the stasis and backsliding over the past two decades, he argues that the Palestinians have made some strides over the years. Instead of rejecting Israel, they've accepted its right to exist. Instead of practicing terrorism, Abbas's Fatah party has embraced non-violence. Palestinian officials have come to terms with acquiring a demilitarized state encompassing only 22 percent of historic Palestine as part of a two-state solution.
  • On the Israeli side, Indyk added, annexing the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs, as some Israelis on the right are calling for, is antithetical to Israel functioning as a democratic, Jewish state. If it remains democratic under this scenario, then the Palestinians will constitute a majority of the population. If it remains Jewish, then the Palestinians will be stripped of their rights.
  • But then, beginning in mid-February, Abbas suddenly "shut down." By the time the Palestinian leader visited Obama in Washington in March, he "had checked out of the negotiations," repeatedly telling U.S. officials that he would "study" their proposals, Indyk said. Abbas later signed 15 international conventions and struck a unity deal with the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. These moves deflated the peace process.
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  • he delivered a frank postmortem on the process, detailing how excruciatingly close negotiators were to a deal and why they ultimately fell short of one. Initially, Israel agreed to release more than 100 Palestinian prisoners in four stages in return for the Palestinians not signing international conventions or attempting to join UN agencies. After six months of direct negotiations between the parties, he explained, Netanyahu "moved into the zone of a possible agreement" and was prepared to make substantial concessions.
  • What accounts for Abbas's about-face? The explanation, Indyk says, lies in Jewish settlement activity during the talks. The U.S. had anticipated limited activity in so-called settlement "blocks" near Israel's 1967 borders, where roughly 80 percent of Jewish settlers live.
  • What caught Washington off guard was the Israeli government's announcements, with each release of Palestinian prisoners, of plans for settlement units, many of which were outside the blocks. "The Israeli attitude is that's just planning," Indyk noted. "But for the Palestinians, everything that gets planned gets built. ... And the fact that the announcements were made when the prisoners were released created the impression that Abu Mazen had paid for the prisoners by accepting these settlement announcements." Netanyahu may have simply been playing domestic politics and trying to placate the Israeli right-wing, but these announcements effectively humiliated Abbas
  • ndyk's implicit message appeared to be that Israel's settlement policy inflicted the most harm on the peace process: The settlement announcements undermined Abbas, who in turn walked away from the talks.
knudsenlu

Where Is Former President Barack Obama? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555296

barack obama politics us trump

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • At a moment when many of his former voters believe that America is facing a genuine democratic crisis, former President Barack Obama has been largely silent about what is happening in American politics. Other than a handful of appearances—an interview with David Letterman in a new Netflix show, or an oral history project at MIT—he insists on following protocol and tradition for former presidents, resisting the temptation to jump back into the political fray.
  • For the past year, President Trump has worked with the Republican Congress to dismantle crucial parts of Obama’s legacy, including affordable health care, progressive taxation, climate-change regulation, oversight of the financial system, and immigration reform. Discussions of Medicare and Medicaid cuts surfacing in recent weeks suggest that an effort to roll back Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society might be next.
  • ut what Trump has done over the past 14 months is anything but usual. He has employed recklessly bellicose rhetoric against dangerous adversaries such North Korea, created massive conflicts of interest by refusing to separate himself from his business empire, risked setting off a debilitating trade war without any careful deliberation, generally ignored overwhelming evidence that the Russians tampered and plan to continue tampering in our elections, and has been willing to play in the sandbox with noxious white nationalism.
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  • But Obama has largely remained silent. That should not come as surprise. His reticence reflects one of the problems that constrained his presidency—his hesitation and resistance to getting down and dirty in the muck of partisan politics. He aimed high, but American politics went low.
  • But when it came to partisan politics, Obama declined to enter into bare-knuckled combat with Tea Party Republicans. He bowed out of the fight at the exact time that he was requiring congressional Democrats to vote on a series of highly controversial issues.
  • Obama’s strategy of trying to deflate his opposition by downplaying or hiding the impact of his programs posed political problems for his political supporters. Democrats wanted Obama to wave the flag of victory, but the president believed that avoiding drama was a better approach. As the president expanded the federal government with a hidden hand, refusing to boast of the effects of the stimulus or downplaying discussions about what his regulatory changes achieved (a sharp contrast from President Trump), Democrats didn’t have as much to work with on the campaign trail.
  • When Obama became president in 2009, Republicans could afford to have former President George W. Bush sit on the sidelines as they rebuilt their strength. Unlike Obama, Bush was hugely unpopular. But more importantly, the right had its institutions as a solid base for revival. The grassroots energy of the Tea Party was connected to these entrenched institutions, from Fox News to Dick Army’s FreedomWorks. But the Democratic Party can’t afford to wait; it needs Obama to learn from one of the great mistakes of his own presidency: his failure to take seriously enough the grave political threat his party was facing.
  • The last time Obama was too timid, the Republicans roared. His party can’t afford to see Obama make that same mistake once again.
manhefnawi

The Regency of Philip of Orleans | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...regency-philip-orleans

Philip of Orleans Louis XV France Bourbon Spanish Throne

shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • The ambitions of Louis XIV dissipated French resources in a series of wasting wars against the combined powers of Europe
  • The King had succeeded in placing his second grandson upon the throne of Spain as Philip V
  • Frankish aristocracy had been distorted by the rise of monarchical despotism
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  • Since Philip V was barred from the succession by the treaties confirming his Spanish throne, and since the third grandson of Louis XIV, the Due de Berry, died in 1714, only one sickly five-year-old child, the second son of the Due de Bourgogne, would separate Philip of Orleans from the crown at the old King’s death
  • The powers bestowed upon Orleans as Regent deflated the pride of the over-confident Du Maine and frustrated the plans of his ambitious wife
  • Apart from the defeated faction, which had the backing of the ultramontane party, and in particular of Madame de Maintenon (the former governess of the royal bastards and keeper of the late King’s conscience), the triumph of Orleans was greeted with enthusiasm
  • The personality of Philip of Orleans lives in the correspondence of his mother, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria
  • the Regent acted as his own Beau Brummell, and directed with whimsical inconsequence the adoption of Turkish, Polish and English fashions
  • Nevertheless, it continued the persecution of the Huguenots instituted by the late King, and ran counter to the intentions of the tolerant and free-thinking Regent
  • The reaction was so strong that in January 1718 the Regent yielded to the pressure of the old order and suppressed the dixième, a minor tax levied by Louis XIV and borne in part by the nobility
  • Since their bargain with Philip of Orleans in the repudiation of Louis XIV’s will, the magistrates had made use of their right of remonstrance to win a permanent share of the power of the monarchy
  • The Due de Bourbon, encouraged by his profits, began to challenge the political power of the Regent and Dubois
  • In October, at the time when a similar wave of speculation in England was in the process of collapse, the Regent withdrew his support
  • Both the regency and the Hanoverian Whig regime in England were subject to external threats—the Regent from the designs of Philip V, abetted by the Du Maine faction, and the government of George I from the plots of the Pretender
  • Austria, too, was threatened in Italy by the ambitions of Philip V’s Queen, Elizabeth Famese and of his chief minister, the adventurer Alberoni. The Hapsburg Emperor, Charles VI, knew that he might count on English support
  • the Triple Alliance of 1717, and then with Austria in the Quadruple Alliance late in the same year
  • His pupil, the Regent, himself occupied the post of First Minister in the few months that were left to him
  • Louis XV displayed affection for no one save his former governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour; but the kindly Regent won his respect
  • The crises of later years were in part due to the failure of the Regent to exorcise the ghost of Louis XIV during the minority of his great-grandson.
  • He liked to be compared with Henry IV, that first and most humane of Bourbon Kings
brickol

The National Debt Is About to Soar. Without a Rescue, It Would Probably Soar Even More.... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...national-debt-coronavirus.html

COVID-19 us economics

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The case is strong for spending a large amount of money in the short term to fend off worse economic woes down the road.
  • The United States government is poised to take on a huge amount of debt to contain the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, with budget deficits on a scale not seen since World War II looking likely.But the only thing worse for the public debt outlook would be if it didn’t. That’s why a broad range of economic analysts — including even many fiscal conservatives who generally view high public debt as a long-term threat — support aggressive action.
  • The very large deficits on the way in 2020 are more likely to leave the United States in a better fiscal situation for the years ahead than an alternative in which the government is more tightfisted but fails to prevent the widespread collapse of American businesses or help workers in desperate financial straits.
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  • Economists focus not on the absolute level of the debt, but on the interest costs to service it relative to the size of the economy. So a prolonged recession tends to be worse for the debt picture than some extra spending. Moreover, signals from financial markets suggest that the government should have little trouble borrowing vast sums of money on favorable terms
  • The exact numbers are still unknowable. The $2 trillion stimulus package has come together so quickly that the budget office has not had time to do its customary modeling of its fiscal impact. (Parts of the legislation are designed as loans, so the hit to the Treasury will be less than the headline number.) G.D.P. is a guessing game at this point.
  • As the economic outlook dimmed over the last month, interest rates plunged to unprecedented lows. The United States government can issue 30-year bonds at only a 1.44 percent interest rate at Thursday’s close — and in inflation-adjusted terms, borrowing costs are negative.
  • Simple math shows why. If the national debt were to rise by $2 trillion compared with what had been forecast, and the government paid for it by issuing 30-year bonds at current rates, the debt service cost would be about $29 billion a year, a trivial amount in a $20 trillion economy. And unlike a private borrower, the government never need pay down its debt; theoretically the debt can remain on the books indefinitely so long as the cost of interest payments is manageable, which in turn depends on economic growth.
  • The Fed may one day need to raise interest rates and sell off its holdings of Treasury bonds to prevent inflation. But that would most likely occur at a time when the economy had returned to its pre-coronavirus trajectory and was seeing higher inflation levels than have been evident over the last decade.All evidence now suggests that day is far away. Currently deflation, or falling prices, is more likely to be a problem. The price of oil, at around $23 a barrel, is roughly one-third the level at which it started the year, and bond prices imply that inflation will average only about 1.07 percent annually over the coming decade.
Javier E

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-trump-response.html

pandemic failure trump policy politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
  • A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
  • Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
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  • The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.
  • Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
  • The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
  • But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
  • The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
  • Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist
  • Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system
  • the task force had gathered for a tabletop exercise — a real-time version of a full-scale war gaming of a flu pandemic the administration had run the previous year. That earlier exercise, also conducted by Mr. Kadlec and called “Crimson Contagion,” predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths following a hypothetical outbreak that started in China.
  • By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work.
  • But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
  • When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
  • He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
  • Mr. Trump’s allies and some administration officials say the criticism has been unfair.
  • The Chinese government misled other governments, they say. And they insist that the president was either not getting proper information, or the people around him weren’t conveying the urgency of the threat. In some cases, they argue, the specific officials he was hearing from had been discredited in his eyes, but once the right information got to him through other channels, he made the right calls.
  • “While the media and Democrats refused to seriously acknowledge this virus in January and February, President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities and expedite vaccine development even when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
  • Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China
  • The Containment IllusionBy the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
  • There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.
  • Facing the likelihood of a real pandemic, the group needed to decide when to abandon “containment” — the effort to keep the virus outside the U.S. and to isolate anyone who gets infected — and embrace “mitigation” to thwart the spread of the virus inside the country until a vaccine becomes available.
  • Among the questions on the agenda, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was when the department’s secretary, Mr. Azar, should recommend that Mr. Trump take textbook mitigation measures “such as school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings,” which had been identified as the next appropriate step in a Bush-era pandemic plan.
  • The group — including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House Task Force — concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing
  • A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.
  • The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,” telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.
  • a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.
  • These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him.
  • He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.
  • A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security Council and titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” documented what more drastic measures would look like, including: “significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread ‘stay at home’ directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.”
  • his friend had a blunt message: You need to be ready. The virus, he warned, which originated in the city of Wuhan, was being transmitted by people who were showing no symptoms — an insight that American health officials had not yet accepted.
  • On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.
  • The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.
  • The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office
  • It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226
  • The China FactorThe earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the administration’s internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative approach by the world’s two leading powers to a global crisis.
  • It was early January, and the call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist left Matthew Pottinger rattled.
  • Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.
  • It was one of the earliest warnings to the White House, and it echoed the intelligence reports making their way to the National Security Council
  • some of the more specialized corners of the intelligence world were producing sophisticated and chilling warnings.
  • In a report to the director of national intelligence, the State Department’s epidemiologist wrote in early January that the virus was likely to spread across the globe, and warned that the coronavirus could develop into a pandemic
  • Working independently, a small outpost of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, came to the same conclusion.
  • By mid-January there was growing evidence of the virus spreading outside China. Mr. Pottinger began convening daily meetings about the coronavirus
  • The early alarms sounded by Mr. Pottinger and other China hawks were freighted with ideology — including a push to publicly blame China that critics in the administration say was a distraction
  • And they ran into opposition from Mr. Trump’s economic advisers, who worried a tough approach toward China could scuttle a trade deal that was a pillar of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.
  • Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse than the Chinese were acknowledging. Inside the West Wing, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, also tried to sound alarms that the threat from China was growing.
  • The Consequences of ChaosThe chaotic culture of the Trump White House contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning and a failure to execute, combined with the president’s focus on the news cycle and his preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.
  • the hawks kept pushing in February to take a critical stance toward China amid the growing crisis. Mr. Pottinger and others — including aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — pressed for government statements to use the term “Wuhan Virus.”Mr. Pompeo tried to hammer the anti-China message at every turn, eventually even urging leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries to use “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement.
  • Others, including aides to Mr. Pence, resisted taking a hard public line, believing that angering Beijing might lead the Chinese government to withhold medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and any scientific research that might ultimately lead to a vaccine.
  • Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach through the middle of March, praising the job Mr. Xi was doing.
  • That changed abruptly, when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.
  • On March 16, he wrote on Twitter that “the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus.”
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to escalate the war of words undercut any remaining possibility of broad cooperation between the governments to address a global threat
  • Mr. Pottinger, backed by Mr. O’Brien, became one of the driving forces of a campaign in the final weeks of January to convince Mr. Trump to impose limits on travel from China
  • he circulated a memo on Jan. 29 urging Mr. Trump to impose the travel limits, arguing that failing to confront the outbreak aggressively could be catastrophic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The uninvited message could not have conflicted more with the president’s approach at the time of playing down the severity of the threat. And when aides raised it with Mr. Trump, he responded that he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing.
  • From the time the virus was first identified as a concern, the administration’s response was plagued by the rivalries and factionalism that routinely swirl around Mr. Trump and, along with the president’s impulsiveness, undercut decision making and policy development.
  • Even after Mr. Azar first briefed him about the potential seriousness of the virus during a phone call on Jan. 18 while the president was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump projected confidence that it would be a passing problem.
  • “We have it totally under control,” he told an interviewer a few days later while attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • The efforts to sort out policy behind closed doors were contentious and sometimes only loosely organized.
  • That was the case when the National Security Council convened a meeting on short notice on the afternoon of Jan. 27. The Situation Room was standing room only, packed with top White House advisers, low-level staffers, Mr. Trump’s social media guru, and several cabinet secretaries. There was no checklist about the preparations for a possible pandemic,
  • Instead, after a 20-minute description by Mr. Azar of his department’s capabilities, the meeting was jolted when Stephen E. Biegun, the newly installed deputy secretary of state, announced plans to issue a “level four” travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to China. The room erupted into bickering.
  • A few days later, on the evening of Jan. 30, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff at the time, and Mr. Azar called Air Force One as the president was making the final decision to go ahead with the restrictions on China travel. Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
  • Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.That sentiment was present throughout February, as the president’s top aides reached for a consistent message but took few concrete steps to prepare for the possibility of a major public health crisis.
  • As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable.
  • the virus was already multiplying across the country — and hospitals were at risk of buckling under the looming wave of severely ill people, lacking masks and other protective equipment, ventilators and sufficient intensive care beds. The question loomed over the president and his aides after weeks of stalling and inaction: What were they going to do?
  • Even then, and even by Trump White House standards, the debate over whether to shut down much of the country to slow the spread was especially fierce.
  • In a tense Oval Office meeting, when Mr. Mnuchin again stressed that the economy would be ravaged, Mr. O’Brien, the national security adviser, who had been worried about the virus for weeks, sounded exasperated as he told Mr. Mnuchin that the economy would be destroyed regardless if officials did nothing.
  • in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS researcher who had joined the task force, who helped to persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant.
  • During the last week in March, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser involved in task force meetings, gave voice to concerns other aides had. She warned Mr. Trump that his wished-for date of Easter to reopen the country likely couldn’t be accomplished. Among other things, she told him, he would end up being blamed by critics for every subsequent death caused by the virus.
Javier E

The 'Great Repression' is here and it will make past downturns look tame, economist say... - 0 views

www.marketwatch.com/...tame-economist-says-2020-04-27

economy effects pandemic trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • In the “base case” for the U.S. economy, published by his firm, Rosenberg Research, the economy “reopens” in May, in a staggered approach across industries and regions. There are “periodic setbacks in terms of COVID-19 case counts…sufficient to make people less comfortable and confident about spending than they did prior to the crisis. A vaccine is not developed in this forecast, but treatment that alleviates the worst respiratory symptoms” is developed within the next six months, he writes.
  • A 30% contraction in real gross domestic product in the second quarter, negative year-over-year consumer price growth for 5 quarters, and an unemployment rate of 14.2% by the end of 2020, averaging 13% throughout 2021.
  • Investors in high-yield debt run for the doors, leaving those bonds more than 700 basis points more expensive than Treasurys at the end of this year.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Rosenberg assumes stocks sink 30% in the coming months, then spend most of the next 18 months grinding higher to valuations about 10% lower than today’s levels.
  • Rosenberg also lays out a “best case,” which depends on a vaccine or treatment emerging in the next six to 12 months. That outlook includes an unemployment rate averaging about 9% for the next two years, a stock-market bottom of 2,500 for the S&P 500 in Q2, and a cyclical low of 29 basis points for the 10-year note in 2021.
  • The “worst-case” scenario is grim. It involves no vaccine, no treatment, and a second wave coronavirus outbreak next winter that severely saps business and household confidence. In this outlook, the jobless rate hits 20% — and averages 17.5% through 2021.
  • Outright deflation takes hold. “Think about what years of no pricing power is going to do to those corporate cash flows in the future,” Rosenberg writes. “Even government intervention is capable of suffering from the laws of diminishing demand. Japan is a classic template.”
  • But there’s a lot more damage done to the stock market. The S&P 500 bottoms at 1,800 in the second quarter and averages only 2,200 throughout 2021.
malonema1

Can Democrats' Resistance Summer Take Down Trump? | The Report | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...istance-summer-take-down-trump

US trump comey

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Rallies. Canvassing. Demanding answers at congressional town halls. Voter registration, organizer training and candidate recruitment. It sounds like it could be some sort of political rehab plan for Democrats, who found themselves losing what most agree was a very winnable presidential race last year, despite having a more experienced, conventional and more traditionally organized nominee. Democrats are calling it Resistance Summer, a season they hope will mark the transition from the shock-and-awe reaction to Donald Trump's inauguration as president to a more focused strategy that will result in more than just abandoned protest signs and deflated balloons.
  • The official Resistance is being run by the Democratic National Committee, which is working with state parties to take the energy now being directed at GOP lawmakers at town halls and turn it into something more tangible. The party is giving matching grants to state affiliates under the program, which the DNC expects to top seven figures by the time it's done. Already, the party has subsidized on-the ground efforts, including activating black, Latino and Asian-Americans who did not vote in the congressional primary in Georgia's sixth district special election, and who could make a difference in the general election contest Tuesday.
woodlu

Peril ahead - Donald Trump faces an array of legal trouble when he leaves office | Unit... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-trouble-when-he-leaves-office

shared by woodlu on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Armchair psychiatrists claim that Mr Trump’s lifelong fear of being seen as a loser has inspired his battle against democracy.
  • at the stroke of noon on January 20th, the legal shield that Mr Trump has wielded to stave off lawsuits will vanish, exposing him to an abundance of civil and criminal legal peril.
  • Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, has been investigating several possible financial crimes, including Mr Trump’s alleged hush-money pay-offs to an adult-film star and a Playboy model on the eve of the 2016 election
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • his old boss directed him to pay these women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, to prevent revelations of extramarital dalliances that could have dented his presidential run. (Mr Trump denies these allegations.)
  • Mr Vance subpoenaed eight years of financial records and tax documents from Mazars USA, Mr Trump’s accountant.
  • the Supreme Court proceeded to sit on a final appeal for three months, staying mum and keeping the documents out of the district attorney’s hands.
  • The ramifications could be serious for Mr Trump as he reprises his role as private citizen: Mr Vance’s office has suggested the investigation may range significantly more broadly than just pay-offs.
  • Potential charges, if evidence is found, could include scheming to defraud, falsification of business records, insurance fraud and criminal tax fraud
  • penalties of up to 25 years.
  • Mr Trump fought assiduously to keep his finances under wraps and soon they may be scrutinised by a grand jury.
  • New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, is investigating what she says may be fraudulent business practices in which Mr Trump and the Trump Organisation inflated the value of their assets when applying for loans and deflated them to evade tax liability.
  • Ms Carroll wrote in 2019 that Mr Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store; Ms Zervos said he sexually harassed her on set
  • Moments after his second impeachment on January 13th, Ms Carroll tweeted: “Trump tore our democracy. I'm going to tear him to shreds in court.”
  • Mr Racine says some members of the Trump family made a sweet deal with themselves when the inaugural committee—a tax-exempt charity—used non-profit funds to pay the Trump International Hotel $175,000 a day to host events during the 2017 inauguration.
  • a violation of District of Columbia law governing the operation of non-profit organisations.
  • that the non-profit footed the bill for a $49,000 payment that should have been issued by the Trump Organisation, a for-profit business.
  • Persuading someone to use “physical force against the person or property of another” is a federal crime; sparking a riot is a crime under DC law.
  • Given the broad scope for free speech set by the First Amendment, however, it may be hard to make criminal charges stick.
  • whether Mr Trump is guilty of inciting a specific lawless action, as opposed to just general exhortation.
  • Mr Trump could also find himself in legal jeopardy for the hour-long phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state on January 2nd.
  • has asked the Department of Justice and Georgia prosecutors to investigate Mr Trump’s bid to find nearly 12,000 votes to swing the election to him some three weeks after the electoral college voted
  • the president may have “illegally conspired to deprive the people of Georgia of their right to vote” and “to intimidate Georgia election officials in an effort to falsify the count of votes in the presidential election”.
  • Mr Trump’s phone call in July 2019 asking Ukraine's president to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of his eventual rival.
  • it could constitute extortion and criminal conspiracy under New York law.
  • Mr Trump may be tempted to issue himself a presidential pardon.
  • No president has ever attempted such legal onanism, though Richard Nixon contemplated it in 1974
  • Counsel in the Justice Department said it would be out of line with the principle that “no one may be a judge in his own case”
  • A self-pardon may run counter to Mr Trump’s instincts, as it would require him to confess to potential misdeeds.
  • The strategy may also backfire if the courts conclude self-pardons are unconstitutional
Javier E

Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump's possible impeachment - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html

gop impeachment trump

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • “Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”
  • Yet with Washington as polarized as at any time in recent history, political winds may not blow strongly enough. As long as impeachment is a Democratic priority driven by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), it will be difficult — if not impossible — for Senate Republicans to get on board, argued Alex Castellanos, a longtime GOP strategist.
  • “The more passions swell in Pelosi’s world, the more McConnell will deflate them,” Castellanos said. Impeachment proceedings, he predicted, will be “an overhyped movie with an unsatisfying end.”
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