"Trump's policies reflect a transformation of the global trade and capital regime that had already started. One way or another, a dramatic change of some kind was necessary to address imbalances in the global economy that have been decades in the making. Current trade tensions are the result of a disconnect between the needs of individual economies and the needs of the global system. Although the global system benefits from rising wages, which push up demand for producers everywhere, tensions arise when individual countries can grow more quickly by boosting their manufacturing sectors at the expense of wage growth—for example, by directly and indirectly suppressing growth in household income relative to growth in worker productivity. The result is a global trading system in which, to their collective detriment, countries compete by keeping wages down.

The tariff regime Trump announced earlier this month is unlikely to solve this problem. To be effective, American trade policy must either reverse the savings imbalance in the rest of the world, or it must limit Washington’s role in accommodating it. Bilateral tariffs do neither.

But because something must replace the current system, policymakers would be wise to start crafting a sensible alternative. The best outcome would be a new global trade agreement among economies that commit to managing their domestic economic imbalances, rather than externalizing them in the form of trade surpluses. The result would be a customs union like the one proposed by the economist John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Parties to this agreement would be required to roughly balance their exports and imports while restricting trade surpluses from countries outside the trade agreement. Such a union could gradually expand to the entire world, leading to both higher global wages and better economic growth."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/global-trading-system-was-already-broken#

"Another harsh reality is that China called Mr. Trump’s bluff and seems to have won this round. When Mr. Trump imposed his tariffs in the first term, President Xi Jinping retaliated with some restraint and sent a delegation to negotiate a trade deal.

This time he retaliated in tit-for-tat fashion and pushed all of his anti-U.S. economic and diplomatic levers. He has cut off U.S. access to crucial rare-earth minerals, stopped the delivery of Boeing jets, looked elsewhere for food and natural-gas imports, and unleashed regulators against American companies.

Beijing has also warned countries not to do trade deals with the U.S. that exclude China—or else. With even U.S. allies facing Mr. Trump’s tariff assault, Beijing’s threat has resonated in a way that it never previously did. U.S. diplomatic sway is ebbing.

The question going forward is whether Mr. Trump is internalizing these economic and political lessons or merely pausing to fight his trade war another day. We doubt even Mr. Trump knows the answer, since so much of his decision-making is ad hoc. He’ll keep his universal 10% tariff in any case."

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/francois-mitterrand-donald-trump-tariffs-trade-economy-markets-7e80c7e9

"An important motivation for US President Trump’s tariff escalation is often overlooked: tariffs serve Trump as a domestic and foreign policy instrument of power. The instrument of power consists of granting tariff exemptions for good behavior and denying such benefits or imposing even higher tariffs for lack of support or even opposition to Trump. Thus, the granting of tariff exemptions is part of a general drive to silence opposition. The article first discusses the contradictory nature of the officially stated goals of Trump’s tariffs, then describes the policy of granting exemptions to foreign nations and domestic companies in Trump’s first presidency, and presents some evidence for a repeat of such favoritism in the second presidency."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/trumps-tariff-policy/

I wish I could get people to understand that the problem with our society is not so much low wages as it is a high cost of living. #economics #PoliticalEconomy #LVT #LandValueTax

US Imperialism in Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges to a Global Community with a Shared Future #MonthlyReview #Imperialism #PoliticalEconomy
https://mronline.org/2025/04/10/us-imperialism-in-crisis-opportunities-and-challenges-to-a-global-community-with-a-shared-future/

"The dominance of US bankruptcy law was not an inevitability. US bankruptcy culture was once unique in the world: after the American Revolution, legislators chose to show mercy to debtors at the expense of the creditors. US statesmen dismissed the traditional difference between laws of insolvency and bankruptcy; creditors were largely powerless to stop reckless debtors from initiating bankruptcy proceedings and receiving a discharge from the state. Today, bankruptcy has generated its own international law. Corporations have ensured that bankruptcy is the most frequently instrumentalized form of forgiveness in increasingly unforgiving zero-sum societies, and bankruptcy harms the cash poor and empowers the asset rich. Those who shape bankruptcy rules establish a hierarchy of contracts and promises, and bankruptcy mechanisms have exposed, often with brutal clarity, who had the power to make or break a contract. How insolvency is then resolved on a global scale demonstrates which contracts and agreements were prioritized after the failure to pay. Considering these norms in a historical light allows us to recover the mission of Latin American jurists to generate a global bankruptcy regime."

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/regimes-of-bankruptcy/

"Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown markets into turmoil among his allies and enemies alike. This anarchy reflects the fact that his major aim was not really tariff policy, but simply to cut income taxes on the wealthy, by replacing them with tariffs as the main source of government revenue. Extracting economic concessions from other countries is part of his justification for this tax shift as offering a nationalistic benefit for the United States.

His cover story, and perhaps even his belief, is that tariffs by themselves can revive American industry. But he has no plans to deal with the problems that caused America’s deindustrialization in the first place. There is no recognition of what made the original U.S. industrial program and that of most other nations so successful.

That program was based on public infrastructure, rising private industrial investment and wages protected by tariffs, and strong government regulation. Trump’s slash and burn policy is the reverse – to downsize government, weaken public regulation and sell off public infrastructure to help pay for his income tax cuts on his Donor Class.

This is just the neoliberal program under another guise. Trump misrepresents it as supportive of industry, not its antithesis. His move is not an industrial plan at all, but a power play to extract economic concessions from other countries while slashing income taxes on the wealthy. The immediate result will be wide-spread layoffs, business closures and consumer price inflation."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/04/14/michael-hudson-robber-barons-trump-tariffs/

The World Under Capitalism: Observations on Economics, Politics, History, and Culture

Branko Milanovic

John Wiley & Sons, 07/04/2025 - 400 páginas

"Branko Milanovic is best known as one of the world’s leading experts on global inequality. But he is also an unusually wide-ranging and penetrating commentator on subjects across economics and beyond, in politics, history, and culture. This book brings together his most searching, provocative, and entertaining articles of recent years, providing an abundance of vital insights into the evolution and dynamics of the world under capitalism.

The volume features important ideas about the struggle to achieve a more equal and prosperous world against not only the predictable forces of deregulation and distraction but new ideas about shrinking the economy to protect the environment. Further from Milanovic’s speciality, readers will find an extraordinary array of reflections on subjects including migration, globalization, the politics and economics of Russia and China, the crisis of liberal democracy, economic and literary history, and the intellectual giants of economics. The pieces are united by Milanovic’s distinctive voice – humane, wry, and realistic – and by remarkable erudition worn lightly whether the topic is the fall of Constantinople, Jane Austen, or the mores of contemporary soccer.

No one can fail to learn from the book, while the sparkling prose, unexpected observations, and sheer importance of the subjects at hand make it a compelling read from start to finish."

https://books.google.pt/books?id=Q3tUEQAAQBAJ

"Many people are nervous about random selection and the idea of bringing together a diverse group to make collective judgments, especially in finance. The concern is, if people don’t know anything about finance, why would we expect them to make good decisions about something as important as where a large fund should invest its money?

Let me address this in two ways. First, research shows that when you bring together a cognitively diverse group – people with different perspectives, backgrounds, education, and life experiences – they tend to make more innovative and well-rounded decisions than a group of people who are demographically similar and all highly educated or experts in the field. For example, a group of Harvard economists may seem more qualified, but a randomly selected group of people who represent a broad spectrum of society can often generate much more fresh, insightful judgments. This idea is supported by cognitive science, which shows that diversity of thought leads to better decision-making.William F. Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the phone book than by the graduating class of Harvard University. I agree with him!

The second point, however, is where things get tricky: how do you manage governance through random selection? It's not just about gathering random people and giving them a question to answer. There are experts involved in the process who help frame the questions and guide the deliberations. This is where the challenge lies – ensuring that the process isn't dominated by facilitators or experts who have their own agendas. The key is to ensure that the decisions are genuinely made by the randomly selected people, not by those managing the process. The effectiveness of this method hinges on good facilitation techniques, ensuring that the facilitators support the process without hijacking it."

https://www.hpeproject.org/blog/democratizing-finance-2

"The contributions to the Forum refer to Simon Clarke’s ‘two stages of the same project’, as Clarke explained regarding Marx’s work. They make apparent that Clarke’s initial intellectual contributions to the critique of political economy, form analysis, value theory, theory of the state and money were essential to his later understanding of the collapse and metamorphosis of the former URSS State Socialism into a capitalist form, and his analysis of the political implications of such transformation on labour relations, working-class interests and class struggle in Russia, other Eastern European countries, China, and Vietnam."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03098168231171635

"In short, the U.S. economy will suffer enormously in a large-scale trade war with China, which the current levels of Trump-imposed tariffs, at more than 100 percent, surely constitute if left in place. In fact, the U.S. economy will suffer more than the Chinese economy will, and the suffering will only increase if the United States escalates. The Trump administration may think it’s acting tough, but it’s in fact putting the U.S. economy at the mercy of Chinese escalation.

The United States will face shortages of critical inputs ranging from basic ingredients of most pharmaceuticals to inexpensive semiconductors used in cars and home appliances to critical minerals for industrial processes including weapons production. The supply shock from drastically reducing or zeroing out imports from China, as Trump purports to want to achieve, would mean stagflation, the macroeconomic nightmare seen in the 1970s and during the COVID pandemic, when the economy shrank and inflation rose simultaneously. In such a situation, which may be closer at hand than many think, the Federal Reserve and fiscal policymakers are left with only terrible options and little chance of staving off unemployment except by further raising inflation."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trade-wars-are-easy-lose

"It’s a myth to think of the US as uniquely free from monetary and fiscal constraints. The US has special powers to issue debt and find willing purchasers, of course, but freedom to issue debt is not the same as freedom to spend. In 1978, the world’s central banks were prepared to abandon their dollar reserves if the US continued to pursue an inflationary politics, as it did under Carter. So in the supply-side view, the US as dollar hegemon is quite limited in the kinds of spending it can support. Off the table is anything that’s too redistributive or liberating—welfare, or investment in free education and health care—because these empower labor and the poor.

By contrast, spending on defense, police, and prisons was fine, as were so-called tax cuts, which are really tax expenditures. The supply siders proposed a budget that was extremely generous in subsidizing financial wealth holders—creating these government-subsidized markets for capital gains—and extremely austere in subsidizing wages or spending on the poor. I think this captures the real motives behind the business revolt of the 1970s. Despite appearances, supply siders weren’t screaming for less government; they were screaming for government to subsidize capital income on a new basis. Hence this shift from industrial profits to capital gains."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/against-the-people/

Wow! I didn't known that McChesney was a rock critic once upon a time. RIP :-(

"Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy, and government.

McChesney came from my favorite subgenre of media scholars: those who had a career in working journalism before entering the hallways of academe. He was a sports stringer for UPI and — even more hardcore — an ace ad salesman. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, the Seattle alt newspaper that would become the bible of the Pacific Northwest music scene, including being the first to write about Nirvana.1

Ironically, his primary contribution to The Rocket’s editorial ethos seems to have been to convince its staffers to cover mainstream acts (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Rush) alongside all the local indie bands they preferred — all “so that advertisers would believe that 100,000 people actually read our magazine…[we] participated in launching The Rocket not because we cared that much about music, but because we cared that much about publishing.” Not the early career you might expect from the man who’d become the country’s chief critic of corporate media ownership."

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/03/robert-w-mcchesney-americas-leading-left-wing-critic-of-corporate-media-has-died/

"The debate over whether to take Trump literally or seriously is over. He has now learnt how to be the tyrant he always wished to be. That took a while. But, with the help he has received, he is there. His administration is engaged in a comprehensive assault on the American republic and the global order it created. Under attack domestically are the state, the rule of law, the role of the legislature, the role of the courts, the commitment to science and the independence of the universities. All these were the pillars on which US freedom and prosperity rested. Now, he is destroying the liberal international order. Soon, I presume, Trump will be invading countries, as he proceeds to restore the age of empires.
(...)
It seems inevitable that these tariffs, plus the uncertainty created by the unanchored, and so unpredictable, new policy environment, will damage the world and US both now and in the longer term. Our economies are far more open than ever before. Sudden and huge increases in protection will have correspondingly bigger economic effects than before. Stock markets are surely right to guess that a good part of today’s productive capital stock will turn out to be scrap: continued market turmoil is likely.

This offers a perverse kind of hope. The attempt by Trump and his associates to undermine the republic would take time. It is now more likely that he will run out of it. Imagine that as a result of all this turmoil, the economy indeed falters and so the Republicans are hammered in the midterms. This would make the Maga project far more difficult to carry out. Who knows? US institutions might begin to show a little backbone. Above all, the next presidential election might actually be a fair one.

So long as Maga dominates the American right, the US potential for unpredictable, irrational and pernicious behaviour will remain. That is, alas, a huge gift to China."

https://www.ft.com/content/d96d4a44-2b75-4222-b77a-afe72c1b9174

"The #history-ian Christopher Lasch diagnosed the ills of late capitalism well... his books continue to be relevant. Three are briefly discussed here: The Culture of #Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (READ THIS!) (+2)... These books will repay the effort more than most current diagnoses of our predicament as we navigate our current very dysfunctional #politicaleconomy and political #culture"

Christopher Lasch and the Distemper of Our Time
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/christopher-lasch-and-the-distemper-of-our-time-a-chronicle-foretold.html

"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

"Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results. In alleged defense against the American turn, Europe and Canada have both donned the nationalist mantle of sovereignty and given Trump one of the main changes he has called for: an increase in their military expenditures so as to correct America’s disproportionate share of NATO’s military costs. Since American firms will also get a good share of the increased military expenditures abroad, the bloated US military-industrial complex will get a further boost.

As well, it may be that the uncertainty created over access to the US market likewise has method in its madness: corporations may now bias future global investments and supply chains to locate in the US “just-in-case.” This is of general concern but hits home especially in Canada since it is so close, so already integrated, and with costs relatively comparable.

Underlying all this lies the primary question at the core of Trump’s agenda. Paraphrased, it asks: “Why, if America is the world’s dominant power, does it accept such a disproportionate share of globalization’s burdens and receive such an unfair share of the benefits?” The framing of America’s status in these over-wrought terms adds a further method-in-madness: misdirection."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/man-who-would-be-king/

"Silicon Valley’s celebration of reading has blended very badly with the worship of power. The problems of the Silicon Valley canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture, in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large-scale social disruption. That highlights some of the possibilities of technology, while occluding others.

Perhaps, instead of remaking America so that it reflects the Silicon Valley ethos, we ought to rebuild Silicon Valley’s internal economy to include some of the diversity and creativity in the society that surrounds it. The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-21/to-understand-doge-look-to-the-tech-industry-s-reading-list

"By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself?"

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2131830/episodes/16917156

"The output of new fusionism was and continues to be virulently, nauseatingly racist. One prominent figure in the movement gleefully recalled watching a peer tell “a black intellectual that his race’s problems might be caused by an hereditary IQ deficiency.” Another, Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The end goal of such a noxious politics was to enshrine racial and gendered inequalities as inevitable, to outsource the difficult work of democratic dispute to pseudoscientists, and to appeal to the ostensible authority of biology to quash dissent. (Never mind that virtually all credible biologists rejected its assertions.) It was a political movement that aspired to eliminate politics altogether, replacing disagreement in the public sphere with the fatalism of genetics.

“Hayek’s Bastards” can be dense — a risk for any serious work of intellectual history — but it can also be entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject: He describes a neoliberal economist’s choice to live in an artists loft as “off-brand” and decries the “punitive neo-Victorian tone” of new fusionist books with titles like “The Loss of Virtue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/04/04/hayeks-bastards-quinn-slobodian-review/