This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme. Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances. Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the November entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...
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From the presumption that Trump must be wrong, fallacious inferences follow. Yes, Trump is a horrible President on too many levels to enumerate. But remember what they say about a stopped clock? The US has no business having troops in Syria. If Trump is in fact intent on withdrawing them: good for him. [ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT NARRATIVE VOICE -- he is not in fact intent on withdrawing them.] If Mattis resigned over that: Mattis was in the wrong, and this is so EVEN IF it is true, as some reporting has it, that Mattis has been a check on some of Trump's worst impulses on other occasions. This is John Glaser, of CATO, on the subject: https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-right-withdraw-syria ------------- The latest news on this front, of course, is that the Trump administration wasn't serious. The troops are staying in Syria after all. It was all a diversion, presumably a way of drawing attention away at least for a brief spell from the new House of Representatives, the Mu...
The cover story of the November 2015 issue of HARPER'S bears the title "Bombast Bursting in Air." It is editor emeritus Lewis Lapham's take on the Presidential election cycle thus far. I'll quote only one brief bit, in which he is discussing Trump, in the period immediately after the first candidates' debate (in early August) on the Republican side. The protectors of the Republican Party's virtue hoped that one of the other nine candidates would topple Trump from his catbird seat, if not the slow and steady Jeb Bush (self-style "joyful tortoise," mature and loving friend of the common man) then maybe Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, or Chris Christie, all of them rated by their touts as quick-witted, sharp-tongues, good at pretending that they care about something other than themselves, able to find Aleppo on a map. During the summer of 2015, the collective attempt at Trump removal failed because the mogul didn't take the proffered bait, decline...
I have to say "cheers," and "hear!hear!" and all that to the British Parliament, and perhaps especially to those Tory party members who defied party discipline to oppose the march toward war. US Presidents are hesitant to launch such adventures without the mother country's support. I got some sense of this back when Tony Blair was acting as W's enabler. Cameron stepped up to attempt to play the same role, but it appears at the moment that Parliament has led him to back down. That is good for them and it may prove lucky for us. I'm not sure I can call any possible result of all this "lucky" for the people of Syria. Their fate looks like a dim one on almost any conceivable time line for years to come. Yet I don't believe that US/UK intervention would have made it any better. Ever since the Obama administration has been talking up a strike, I've been wondering this: when do we start calling a series of [separate?] conflicts a...