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When Obama was president, Republicans made a huge deal about deficits bankrupting the country, refusing to adequately fund the recovery program and demanding deep cuts in federal spending. Now that Trump is in, deficits suddenly don’t matter. The tax cut will add a trillion dollars to the national debt. The budget deal that was recently […]

…to President Trump’s desire to have his own version of a Red Square Roll-Out-The-Nukes-and-Salute! parade. The first is to note the absurdity of all this. At a time when even hard power is best measured by a nation’s development of things like quantum computing, our new tanks aren’t really a good measure of our might. […]

Now, it’s made up about half of his losses. I’ve been waiting for Trump to tweet that Monday’s sickening market slide was the Democrats’ fault. They spooked investors by refusing to approve his wall; or by failing to applaud his State of the Union address; or maybe by threatening his very presidency, the source of […]

…not least the inherent instability of markets. One perennial cause for such drops, however, is the fear of inflation, of higher interest rates and tighter credit. Which, in our shareholder-uber-alles form of capitalism, translates into a phobia of rising wages. By any measure, it’s hard to find very much that could have triggered this fear. […]

 What’s at work? For starters, the market has been rising at a completely unsustainable rate, driven by low interest rates, stock buybacks, high corporate profits, and investor expectations of even dizzier heights. At some point, it had to come down to earth, even with the pro-corporate tax-cuts. In addition, the declining unemployment rate has been […]