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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

Protectionism anywhere is invariably bad for local consumers and the global economy, but American protectionism is infinitely worse. It’s a betrayal of the liberal-international order we founded nearly eight decades ago; an invitation to anti-Americanism; a rebuff to our friends; and sometimes (Boston Tea Party, anyone?) a prelude to war.

what motivates the president to pick these fights? Rust-belt politics surely plays a role. But it’s also the same ideological obsession he has held since at least the 1980s — as dated and ugly as his mullet — not to mention his sneering indifference to what was once called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

When the Wall Street Journal editorial board (of which I was then a member) asked Trump in 2015 whether he worried that his immigration and trade policies could have disastrous political effects in Mexico, he answered: “I don’t care about Mexico honestly, I really don’t care about Mexico.” Next month, Mexicans, who do care, will likely elect their most anti-American president in nearly 50 years.

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night,

Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.

They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism,

if protectionism really is becoming an important political force, how should reasonable people — economists and others — respond?

To make sense of the debate over trade, there are three things you need to know.

The first is that we have gotten to where we are — a largely free-trade world — through a generations-long process of international diplomacy, going all the way back to F.D.R. This process combines a series of quid pro quos — I’ll open my markets if you open yours — with rules to prevent backsliding.

a private letter he wrote to his investors a little over two weeks ago about investing during the age of President Trump — and offering his thoughts on the current state of the hedge fund industry — has quietly become the most sought-after reading material on Wall Street.

He is Seth A. Klarman, the 59-year-old value investor who runs Baupost Group, which manages some $30 billion.

Mr. Klarman sets forth a countervailing view to the euphoria that has buoyed the stock market since Mr. Trump took office, describing “perilously high valuations.”

“The people who are supporting Trump represent a significant portion of the Republican base, which has always been less ideological and more about trust of the person,” Mr. Domenech said. “It is something both the Republican leadership in Washington and conservative ideological elites have underestimated.”

many people at his rallies agreed with Mr. Trump on the issue. “I oppose abortion, but I think Planned Parenthood does a lot of good for people who can’t afford birth control,” said Kim Wells, a schoolteacher and Trump supporter in North Augusta.

Mr. Trump rejected attacks from Jeb Bush and other candidates that he was not a conservative. He dismissed ideological labels altogether, a sentiment endorsed by the 10,000 people in the arena, who thundered their approval over and over. Instead of calling himself conservative, Mr. Trump said, “I’m a guy with common sense that’s going to make us a fortune.”

The direct purpose of his trip to China is to attend a meeting of the Group of 20, but perhaps more importantly, the visit is intended to breathe life into one of his big ideas: the pivot to Asia. It is a genuinely important policy, but Obama is now the last man standing willing to push for it.

when the flash points of today have passed, the rise of Asia will remain the dominant trend of our time.

According to the World Bank, in just 10 years, four of the five largest economies in the world will be in the Asia-Pacific region. The United States will be able to shape the 21st century only if it remains a vital Pacific power.

“The era of using offshore low-cost labor will come to an end because the standard of living is rising around the world,

To many in Silicon Valley, this is just part of inexorable progress. Electing Mr. Trump won’t shield his supporters from the reality that they are now competing with every other worker on Earth

Mr. Srinivasan views the collision between tech culture and Mr. Trump’s populist movement as inevitable, and potentially so divisive that tech’s global elites should effectively secede from their respective countries, an idea he calls “the ultimate exit.”

In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.

For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions.

So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.

All candidates worry about pleasing their supporters or building coalitions, even as they craft policies that reflect their core beliefs. But it is striking how often public acclaim is Mr Trump’s first and last concern.

Explaining in an interview with the New York Times why it would be “nice” for America and Russia to fight Islamic State together, he imagined how, if his plan succeeded: “The people will stand up and give me a massive hand.

The president-elect reportedly argued that Mr Romney “looks the part” of a world statesman—sounding more like a casting agent than a man assembling a government.

Donald Trump has begun carrying out his campaign pledges to undo America's trade ties -- starting Monday with executive action to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"Great thing for the American worker, what we just did," Trump told reporters

Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a 12-nation deal that had been negotiated under former President Barack Obama.

Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, stunned lawmakers and foreign governments at his Jan. 11 Senate confirmation hearing when he said that the United States would be ready to block China’s access to artificial islands it is building in the South China Sea. Seemingly just a gaffe, the White House later appeared to double down on Tillerson’s stance, which taken at face value would be tantamount to an act of war.

The comments suggest President Donald Trump’s White House is eager to take an aggressive tone with Beijing, but lacks a coherent strategy to deal with China or a basic grasp of the legal and security issues at stake in the South China Sea, said former officials, diplomats, Asia experts and congressional aides.

Tillerson’s threat that America would bar China’s access to disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea would mark a radical break with long established U.S. policies dating back to the 1990s

The presidential election of 1968 was a milestone in partisan realignment — the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties

In 2016, this half-century process of partisan realignment is all but complete. What we are seeing instead of partisan realignment is policy realignment — the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.

For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.

The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.

Why couldn’t the GOP have figured all this out before Trump got to 1,237 delegates?

Right-wingers will smell a plot. (The MSM held back until he had the nomination!) But there were a number of factors in the primary — a huge field (dividing the not-Trump vote and shielding him in debates), a press entranced with his media show, the novelty of his “act,” and the collapse of his opponents at critical times (e.g., Sen. Marco Rubio’s pre-New Hampshire primary debate) — that aided Trump.

there is something fundamentally amiss on the right that in a mere six weeks the country has figured out Trump, whereas Republicans in nine months plainly could not see the character they were embracing. That should highlight some troubling deficiencies on the right.

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico – are stronger.

But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Previous administrations have always taken seriously their responsibility to advance US interests. But the policies they pursued usually were framed in terms of an enlightened understanding of national interest. Americans, they believed, benefited from a more prosperous global economy and a web of alliances among countries committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

From an economic standpoint, Bannon is talking mumbo jumbo. Protectionism and immigration exclusion retard growth; they do not promote it. We do not lose “sovereignty” when our consumers enjoy a higher standard of living thanks to imported goods. And in the regulations department, what could be more of a regulatory burden than cutting legal immigration, trying to influence which suppliers to use via a border adjustment tax or bullying companies about where they set up their plants?

This is not about sovereignty; it is about creating an even more powerful government, one that is oblivious to economic reality and ignores the political and economic upheavals that the policies create.

If he has been listening to U.S. business leaders, allies, informed members of Congress or the Federal Reserve chairman, he must have figured out how counterproductive his nationalist ideas are. (We’ve tried this before in the 1930s — with poor results.) And yet the appetite to decimate liberal Western democracies and shred an international system that has maintained relative peace and prosperity is unabated.