Listening to hysterical commentary from the mainstream media about President Trump’s tariffs, one would think his policies were in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth. America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry
Markets are still coming to grips with the reality of the trade war after many months of complacency. The first trade war since the 1930s has escalated and may continue for years to come. Trump may not be done with tariffs. In the days and weeks ahead, we can expect further mentions of tariffs on
U.S.-Iranian relations are back where they were in 2013. But the next few years will play out differently this time around. From 2012–2013, the U.S. and Iran fought a financial war. The U.S. first banned Iran from the U.S. dollar payments systems (FedWire) and later worked with allies to ban Iran from the global payments
It’s far too soon to make definitive forecasts about who will win the presidential election in 2020. But it’s not too soon to offer forecasts about who will not win. Right now Joe Biden tops that list. Of course he’s ahead in the national polls, but there’s no such thing as a national election in
We’ve all just lived through two years of investigations, accusations and speculation about possible “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian agents designed to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. There’s no doubt about Russian interference, but the subject of collusion by Trump was hotly contested. Now that issue is settled. The Mueller report
Investors trying to handicap the 2020 presidential election should always bear in mind that 90% of the coverage and analysis you see and hear is filtered through a small band of anti-Trump reporters and channels based in New York and Washington, D.C. This group of mainstream media pundits got the 2016 election badly wrong;
My proprietary model currently gives Trump a 63% of winning re-election in 2020. (This is the same model I used to predict Trump would win in 2016 and the U.K. would vote to “leave” the EU. Both predictions were against all odds.) My 63% estimate may be a bit low, but I’m maintaining a conservative
U.S. policy through the Bush and Obama administrations was to soft-pedal questionable Chinese trade practices, pirating technology and theft of intellectual property in return for cheap manufactured goods and China’s willingness to finance trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt. Now Trump has changed the rules of the game. He’s said lost jobs in the
The trade war is back on. The trade deadline came and went at midnight last night without a deal. So 25% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods took effect at 12:01. The tariffs had previously been set at 10%. Based on Trump’s comments, 25% tariffs may possibly be applied to an additional $300
It’s almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion about climate change. That’s because the science has been hijacked and politicized in support of a political agenda that would not have any following at all but for the “fear factor” that proponents instill using climate change as a cudgel. As George Orwell warned 70 years ago,
