Politics and the economy
In all the coronation hoo-hah, it was easy to overlook another significant political event: the visit to the UK of Republican presidential hopeful, Ron DeSantis.
And what do you know, he’s good.
Good enough for a meaningful full length interview. Unlike so many these days.
Continue reading “Not a coronation, but DeSantis may still deserve the crown”
This week US President Joe Biden issued a video message to say he was joining former President Donald Trump in offering to renew his employment in 2024.
For different reasons, both men consider themselves eminently qualified. An important reason for both is that they are not the other.
Recent disclosures in the Fox News defamation case suggest that some who once had access to Trump are unenthusiastic about his candidacy.
More direction on economic reform does not necessarily make things clearer on the political side.
We’ve just had the remarkable saga of Germany’s Chancellor Scholz doing his best to stop Ukraine getting a timely supply of German-built Leopard tanks.
Even his Green party foreign minister was moved to remind him that “We are fighting a war against Russia” (diplomats have since been at some pains to explain that this does not mean that Germany is a formal party to the conflict).
America’s Democrats sighed with relief after Tuesday’s mid-term elections, even though they look likely to narrowly lose control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate.
Because notwithstanding high levels of voter dissatisfaction, the widely-anticipated Republican wave petered out.
We should be impressed with the ability of diverse voters and voting regimes over a sprawling continent to deliver such finely nuanced results (including decisive victories for Trump Republican rivals such as Brian Kemp in Georgia and Ron DeSantis in Florida).
Well, Elon Musk certainly is.
The man is shaping as the Gordian knot cutter of the age. Or at the very least, the one able to set the most hares running.
This seems unlikely to get much credit from New Zealand’s authorities (read Thomas Cranmer on their differences).
But then not many people could – or would – take over a stagnant global media platform. Then immediately fire its entire top team. To be followed by the swift departure of half its workforce. Oh – and end home-working.
An insightful mini-essay from Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen on how his “own preferred slant of classical liberalism is being replaced” by what – for want of an agreed term – he categorises as the “New Right”.
At his level of intellectual discourse, this means “the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians”.
Presumably they didn’t. But nonetheless “the New Right doesn’t entirely reject the basic principles of free market economics”. (Is ‘entirely’ redundant here?)
Continue reading “Excellent writing on the New Right. The Old might read “
Nobel prize committees are responsible for briefly focusing the world’s attention on some pretty recondite stuff. Sometimes with comic results. But occasionally, they get it just right.
As the years rack up since 2008 global financial crisis, Ben Bernanke’s economics prize – resting in part on his work on the financial collapse of the Great Depression – looks righter and righter.
It was certainly the world’s good fortune (that or G. W. Bush’s foresight) that put the leading contemporary scholar of the monetary and banking disasters of the 1930s in the chair of the US central bank at the right time.
Continue reading “Lessons galore from Bernanke’s Nobel prize”
Britain’s new PM, Liz Truss, might have caught a break last night.
The International Monetary Fund, after a longish period of complaisance in regard to fiscal stimulus, abruptly decided that the Truss economic plan was a good point to draw a line, in part because giving people their money back was seen as untargeted and might increase inequality.
But in being so unusually prompt and decisive, it has missed a chance to wait and see which way the wind blows.
The what-will-happen-to-China’s-economy debate seems a bit stale these days.
So thanks are due to Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, for coming up with one of the more plausible models of the Chinese economy.
His insight is in his analysis of the relationship between the private and state sectors. And it seems a little more convincing than the far-seeing technocratic genius stuff so attractive to international bureaucrats and journalists.
Continue reading “Five paths for China – none of them look good”
A year on from the Capitol riot which celebrated Joe Biden’s victory in the US electoral college, a lot has changed.
Then again, perhaps not so much.
So if you are keen to understand why half of America doesn’t fully share the orthodox media position you might ponder the concept of “sophisticated state failure” in the words of Holman W. Jenkins Jr writing in the Wall Street Journal.
Point of Order 