Gideon Rachman is here theft:
“Our rates strategy will be to shoot first and ask questions later.” That was what Donald Trump’s most important economic policy makers told me at the end of last year.
That kind of Macho -Wagger is currently fashionable in Washington.
Macho Swagger? Where have we seen that before?
In 2004, the Bush government had very faith in his Ability to shape reality:
In the summer of 2002, after I wrote an article in Esquire that the White House did not like about Bush’s former communication director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the displeasure of the White House and then he told me something that I did not fully understand at the time – but that I believe it is now in the heart of the Bush Presidium.
The assistant said that boys like me were “in what we call the reality -based community”, who he defined as people who “believe that solutions arise from your judgmental study of perceived reality.” I nodded and muttered something about lighting principles and empirism. He cut me off. “That is not the way the world really works more,” he continued. “We are now a rich, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you study that reality – judiciary, as you want – we will act again, create other new realities, which you can also study, and that is how things will figure out. We are the actors of history. . . And you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. “
Unfortunately, the reality often has its own agenda. And as we saw in Iraq, it is not always what one would like to happen.
I often see experts who discuss the economic implications of rates. Everyone who has taken EC101 already knows that rates reduce efficiency and I have little to add that question. Moreover, it is not always easy to know what kind of policy is proposed. Is the government plan to impose rates, or only threaten rates to bully our allies in Kowtowing to our government with symbolic gestures of submissiveness?
In my opinion, the most important question today is not the technical aspects of economic policy, it is not the loss of deadweight of rates, it is rather the global political climate. What explains the recent increase in authoritarian nationalism? Economy is downstream of politics.