"Biden rejected Reaganite trickle-down economics but settled on another kind of trickle down: fixing things in the far reaches of supply chains in hopes the benefits will eventually reach ordinary people." @isabellamweber.bsky.social foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/09/a...
it's not that i'm hopeful. it's optimism of the will. we have to do this. we have seen some successes, in and through the courts. the public's interest and support does help judges find courage i think. Stephen Miller wants to do evil, a lot of evil. we have to stop him. bsky.app/profile/muel...
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There’s a difference between not thinking about operations because we’ve designed and automated them, and not thinking about them because we’ve lost the capability to understand them.
We agree this is not a system working for everyone. I’m terribly sorry to hear you are living in a car. It’s intolerable that we don’t provide a foundation well above that. I’m not quite there, but am not great. We disagree about what to do about it. But I get, viscerally, where you’re coming from.
i think the result of violence is usually catastrophe. the last 80 years includes the best period in US history. the last 50 have been a bad. we got the better years by reform, under threat of breakdown sure, without enduring the miseries of actual, complete breakdown. careful what you wish for.
what they used to call a “rap session” is now described as a “trade deal”.
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reform vs revolution is an old debate. i guess we have different views about what history reveals. (i’m on the reform side, though i have to concede that the risk of revolution, the threat of a real breakdown, has often been crucial to reform. so the “sides” are not quite fully opposite.)
Among the most urgent things we need to do is reform the electoral system, in order to change the nature of Congress. Seems hard! They benefit from the *status quo*. And yet, in recent decades Australia, New Zealand, Japan all did manage to reform how their parliaments are elected. It can be done.
Who are we? The people Donald Trump hires, literally from Fox News? We've seen transitions to more virtuous systems. The governments of the Nordics didn't result from burning everything down. The resulted from political conflict, in which farmers and workers aligned to build power, and then reform.
We do have the wealth and sophistication to transition to those things! But that wealth and sophistication resides in our institutions. If you just burn them all down, rather than reshape and reform them, you'll find you don't have the wealth and sophistication to provide the better society we want.
i never understood why people so distrustful someone might be trying to profit from a vaccine so trust people who are ostentatiously hawking supplements for money. ht @edgeofsports.bsky.social
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the way you make america great again is you make the world great again. the “agains” in both places are arguable.
it’s the educational equivalent of the shareholder value revolution.
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There are a lot of potential tensions, both on the finance side and the real side! I agree that balance doesn’t preclude all potential tensions, but imbalance is the biggest and surest root of them, I think. Balance won’t absolve us from having to monitor e.g. our investment cross-relationships tho.
very good to your "feeble" mind is about the highest compliment i could receive.
Hedges can break, and must always be limited. Trade counterparties don't need to hedge for years. They need to hedge over a production cycle. 1/
Counterparties in FX hedges for hub-and-spoke trade are hub-country institutions, who might be forced to provide hub-currency on disadvantageous terms. *In extremis* they can be bailed out by hub country central banks. 2/
(To receivers of hub currency, there is the risk of its decline relative to local, the goal is to insure against local currency strength. The depth of those markets are largely up to local currency markets. But note that the current practice of reserve currency accumulation doesn't hedge that.) /fin
I think we want an institution in the broad sense of a set of wisely understood and adhered practices, rather than a formal institution like a global central bank / ICU. 1/
We still need to engender a degree of international buy-in and consensus. But the norms agreed can be enforced in a decentralized and competitive manner, while a formal institution is fragile to leadership takeover, would be too risky in so conflictual a world, I fear. 2/
I guess I see IMF evolving into a creditors' whip as a pretty severe cautionary tale. But so I think we need institutions that, if widely employed in an incentive-compatible way, will yield results similar to Keynes' technocratic enforcer of balance. /fin
Yes. Countries that want to be in the business of providing media of exchange for international trade should provide facilities by which participants in commerce can access liquidity on demand, and should encourage deep markets in FX hedges against their currencies. Absolutely.
I guess I disagree with the premise. There needs to be some stock of internationally tradable currency/bonds for liquidity purposes, but it doesn't have to be large, and there needn't be a hegemonic debtor providing it. 1/
As you suggest, swaps by prominent currency provider central banks renders international media of exchange fully elastic. Like credit card debt that won't revolve, that you pay end of month, the money appears to smooth transactions and disappears when transactions net. 2/
The Triffin dilemma is obsolete. A perpetually growing stock of external reserves is neither necessary nor desirable. /fin
I think that's basically an orthogonal concern. It's a very real concern, one countries must address! But balance is not about resilience, or vice versa.