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46 Long Months
Is the Fed's inflation goal actually achievable in the post-pandemic macro reality, defined as it is
On a forward basis, it is 46 long months to the next adminstration…maybe.
Economics Professor Richard Wolff is a nobody.
Or is he?
Will Brics nations pose a real challenge to Donald Trump’s second term in office? And how do Trump’s tariffs stack up against this rising bloc?
US economist Richard D. Wolff joined us for an extended conversation on Trump, tariffs Brics, as well as the US plan to ‘take over’ Gaza.
“This is difficult here in the US for people to hear, but it’s the truth. The American empire is declining,” argues Wolff who claims that the Brics coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will have an economic edge over the US.
Stagflation looks like the most likely outcome for 2025. Lower inflation via recession looks most likely late 2025 to 2026. It’s a slow moving train wreck we are watching…
It really is. “Trump 2.0” probably isn’t going to turn out especially well, and I say that apolitically here. Yes, this is a dark period for the US and for the world more generally, but these last few weeks were also overtly funny if you can laugh at such things. It’s pure slapstick. DOGE’s freshman accounting errors, Trump racing around a NASCAR track then jumping on social media to announce no more pennies, this sort of “thou protest too much” obsession with transgender culture war issues (they’ve talked more about transgender people in six weeks than Democrats did in six years), the official White House social media accounts posting pictures of Trump wearing a crown on fake TIME magazine covers, and on and on. It’s just so blatantly unserious, and at every turn. You have to wonder how this clown car’s going to respond in the event of another catastrophe like COVID. And look, there will be another catastrophe, or at least a crisis. There always is. We tend to lose track of that, but think about it: Gaza/Israel, Ukraine, inflation, pandemic, Crimea, Lehman, 9/11… and it just goes all the way back. I have no idea what’s next, but I don’t see a single serious person in this administration with perhaps the exception of Rubio, and he looked, in Riyadh, like he was deeply depressed. Maybe that was just Marco’s poker face, but whatever the case, these folks are deliberately clownish (which is something different from the kind of accidental clownishness we expect from government). That’s going to come back to haunt everybody at some point.
Adding to this list of strange things this past month, I thought sending the Treasury secretary to Ukraine to haggle with Zelinsky about mineral rights was perplexing.
The last time there was a crisis, the orange man recommended people drink bleach. So the bar in terms of what to expect is not set very high.