“What Trump is trying to achieve is to show business in a lot of this country they aren’t going to be ruined by absurd regulation by bureaucrats.”
.. Mr. Icahn was an early backer of Mr. Trump and urged him to support efforts to let U.S. corporations bring home offshore cash and to end the carried-interest tax break that benefits many on Wall Street.
.. Mr. Icahn, who has spent the past four decades battling big companies as an activist investor, already has been wielding influence in the president-elect’s transition team. He is playing a central role in selecting the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said people familiar with the matter
.. “Trump seems to want to run a flat organization with no real hierarchy, which leaves open the possibility of a lot of poles of power and tug-and-pull within the administration,” said Jeb Mason, a Treasury Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “This may leave everyone guessing about who holds ultimate sway.”
.. Several liberal economists said although they oppose many of Mr. Navarro’s policy ideas, he deserves credit for challenging both Democrats and Republicans to think differently about the costs of globalization.
.. He has written several books with provocative titles, including “The Coming China Wars” in 2008 and “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action” in 2011, and struck up a correspondence with Mr. Trump several years ago after he saw an interview in which the New York businessman spoke approvingly of Mr. Navarro’s China analysis...Mainstream economists have taken a dim view of recent articles by Messrs. Navarro and Ross that characterize U.S. trade deficits as a drag on growth, which economists say present a flawed and confused view of elementary economic principles.“Peter Navarro, a friend, is just wrong,” Lawrence Kudlow, the CNBC commentator who advised Mr. Trump earlier this year on taxes, posted on Twitter before the election.
China Throws Out South China Sea Rule Book
Beijing hardly bothers with a legal rationale for seizing a U.S. drone
On Tuesday, China handed back the craft, a day after a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman insisted that the sailors were simply gathering unattended property, as one might “pick something up from the street.”
Bond Selloff Shows Risks of China’s Efforts to Restrain Credit
the yuan, has fallen to its lowest level against the U.S. dollar since 2008 as more Chinese move their wealth out of the country despite strict capital controls.
.. China’s total debt surged to around $27 trillion this year, or 260% of gross domestic product, compared with 154% in 2008 at the start of a stimulus program to offset the financial crisis. It is continuing to grow at more than twice the pace of the economy.
.. Last week, some bondholders, including asset managers and issuers of “wealth management products”—off-balance-sheet investment vehicles used by banks and other institutions to get around regulatory limits on lending—were likely squeezed too much. As a result, they began dumping government bonds—which are liquid and thus easy to sell—to raise cash, analysts say.
.. The selloff sent China’s benchmark 10-year government bond yield to 3.33%
.. The 10-year bond yield had hit a 14-year low of 2.66% as recently as October.
.. Last week’s sharp price drop has raised concerns that a larger bond rout may be in the offing
.. Many economists say China’s debt scale up may result in a crash similar to the 2008 mortgage crisis in the U.S., or a long slowdown such as Japan’s after its 1980s property bubble burst—or both.
.. The clearest sign that many Chinese are worried is the amount of money flowing out of China despite strict measures to stop it. China’s foreign reserves have dropped by 21% to $3.05 trillion in the past two years.
.. A key question now is how much of China’s bond market is owned outright, and how much was bought with money borrowed under murkier circumstances such as shadow finance, raising risks. Analysts estimate leverage in the system overall is between 1.2- and 5-times assets, a relatively low figure, although in pockets of the market it can go much higher.
.. But since much of the financial system is lightly regulated, the true amount of leverage in the system is unknown.
.. Economists say China’s central bank has the firepower to keep its debt markets from plunging by injecting more money into the system if necessary.
Responsibility for Lost Manufacturing Jobs to China
Sometime during the Clinton Administration, it was decided that an economically strong China was good for both the globe and the U.S. Fair enough. To enable that outcome, U.S. policy deliberately sacrificed manufacturing workers on the theory that a.) the marginal global benefit from the job gain to a Chinese worker exceeded the marginal global cost from a lost US manufacturing job, b.) the U.S. was shifting toward a service sector economy anyway and needed to reposition its workforce accordingly and c.) the transition costs of shifting workers across sectors in the U.S. were minimal.
As a consequence – and through a succession of administrations – the US tolerated implicit subsidies of Chinese industries, including national industrial policy designed to strip production from the US.