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I recorded the video segment below on on RT America on Wednesday night (Notice my green tie for St. Patrick’s Day!). The overall gist of the clip was that the currency battle now brewing between China and the U.S. is mostly a political confrontation. There are reasonable ways out of this that don’t include a [...]

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Here’s how I see things playing out:

Congress looks at this report and concurs that the key to ending slower global growth is to correct global imbalances via a Chinese currency revaluation. Fair enough.
However, individual Congressmen, looking to reassure jobless constituents ahead of the midterm elections, will escalate by presenting bills to ‘punish’ China if [...]

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I came across an article in the FT by Gideon Rachman which examined “How Reagan ruined conservatism.” It is an interesting piece which claims that traditional conservatives abhor populism and respect knowledge, while the Reagan Revolution ushered in a ‘new’ conservatism that appealed to those who love populism and disdain knowledge. All very interesting – [...]

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This is an update on trade and protectionism because the last posts I wrote on protectionism were in December. Since then, the only two major events on the protectionist front happened last Friday.
Canada and the Buy American Fiasco
The National Post of Canada trumpeted Protectionism ‘breakthrough’ reached on Friday because Canada received an exclusion to the [...]

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Hat tip Prieur du Plessis

Source
20 Jan 2010 editorial cartoon – Nick Anderson, Comics.com

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The poll results are in on why President Obama has begun a ‘War on Wall Street.’ A majority of CW readers believe President Obama’s recent populist turn and harsh rhetoric directed toward Wall Street is a political stunt. And to the degree CW readers believe otherwise, they see the latest salvos as only a start. [...]

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That’s the gist of yesterday’s post by James Pethoukoukis.  The column says:
A historic victory, really. It is hard to overstate just how “blue” a state Massachusetts is. Obama won it by 26 percentage points in 2008. Until now the state’s 10 U.S House members, two U.S. senators and all statewide officers were Democrats. The state [...]

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Today President Obama is set to propose wide-ranging moves on bank regulation first proposed by his economic advisor Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman. Details of the proposal have yet to be released. However, the focus is expected to center on strict bank size limits and a limitation on proprietary trading at regulated banks [...]

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FDIC Chairperson Sheila Bair has released her own proposal to compete with a recently floated proposal for a tax on bank compensation.  Her proposal calls for linking compensation with FDIC insurance levies as a means of aligning incentives in the banking industry going forward. In contrast, the competing initiative calls for a one-off ‘windfall’ tax [...]