Faisal’s Web Site
Thursday, 3 April 2025
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Paul Krugman: “Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally. […] One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and […] The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy”
Tired of Winning Yet?
Maia Mindel: “… the trade deficit is not a major problem for any economies: […] when a country has an inflow of currency due to trade, its economy has higher inflation, resulting in a stronger currency in real terms and therefore in a reduction of the deficit. So eventually, unless the government maintains it, the deficit would disappear and so would a surplus - except that tariffs would, as mentioned before, make the economy much poorer and smaller in order to achieve it.”
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Donald Trump and the Interests of Capital
Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money: “The first thing to always understand about the modern economy is the post New Deal creation of a functioning and stable economy was meant to help capital. Bringing workers into a junior partnership with the state was to help capital.”
An Insult to Life Itself?
Maia Mindel: “Technology doesn’t actually displace jobs it displaces some, if not all, of the tasks that those jobs do. So when people say ‘70% of jobs are at risk of automation’, what they actually mean is ‘70% of jobs contain tasks that could plausibly be automated’.”
Thursday, 27 March 2025
Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle
Sam Deutsch: “And it’s not just the MTA - buses in New Jersey are seeing significantly faster travel times …”
Monday, 24 March 2025
Speculations at the Outer Bounds of the Constitutional Order
Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: “The American fiscal economy consists of trillions of dollars being drawn out of the states and then being pumped right back into them as contracts, grants, various kinds of federal support for things like roads and infrastructure and finally programs of direct support like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.”
Friday, 21 March 2025
Is the Sleeping Giant Awakening?
Paul Krugman: “It’s not just the tariffs and Trump’s obvious support for Putin. I don’t know if Americans realize how big a shock it has been that European citizens are being arrested and detained by ICE. Suddenly it’s clear that America is not an ally, may not even be a democracy, and Europe must look after itself.”
Friday, 7 March 2025
Searching for settings in all the wrong places
Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors: “You might have a free trial of Apple TV+ from the purchase of new Apple hardware, or something else. Apple has decided that this is the second most important function of visiting Settings.”
America is at its weakest since the Civil War
Walter H. White Jr., The Contrarian: “One of the critical aspects of diplomacy is integrity.”
Thursday, 6 March 2025
It’s Up to Europe Now
Paul Krugman: “Like tens of millions of Americans, I hate the fact that we need to appeal to foreign leaders to do the right thing …”