The 1970s saw the proliferation of single-issue interest groups that constituted the New Right. The first Conservative Political Action Conference was held in 1973. In 1977, a year after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent Gerald Ford, Reagan addressed the conference. “The new Republican party I am speaking about,” he said, “is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat, and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.”
.. American Affairs got its start as a blog, the Journal of American Greatness, whose objective was to provide, in the words of its most famous contributor, “a sensible, coherent Trumpism.”
.. It is not Trumpism but this larger concept that needs to be made sensible and coherent. I am speaking of nationalism.
.. It is not Trumpism but this larger concept that needs to be made sensible and coherent. I am speaking of nationalism.
.. When the Cold War ended, Mitchell writes, victorious elites in Washington, London, and Brussels began constructing a world where attachments to national identity would be attenuated or even severed. One would belong to a group above the nation — be a “citizen of the world,” an employee of a multinational corporation or NGO, a partisan of Davos, a subject of the EU — or to a hyphenated group below it.
.. Increasingly, power is shifted away from individuals elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government — that is, providing for consumption. Like all managers, they derive their power from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to the political community but to the other managers that define their qualifications.
.. This lack of accountability has been highlighted again and again over the last 16 years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired. Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy came close to collapse — and the banks were bailed out.
.. This lack of accountability has been highlighted again and again over the last 16 years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired. Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy came close to collapse — and the banks were bailed out.
‘Are We Safe Yet?’ The answer’s not so simple.
Since 2008, U.S. banks have raised roughly $500 billion in new shareholder capital, bringing the total to $1.7 trillion. The added capital provides a larger cushion against losses (and, of course, the new shareholders enjoy any profits).
.. In addition to more capital, banks also have a more stable base of funds used for lending. According to Geithner, deposits now represent 86 percent of U.S. banks’ liabilities, up from 72 percent in 2008. Deposits tend to be stable, because most are insured by the government (up to $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) During the crisis, the flight of uninsured short-term funds (so-called repurchase agreements and commercial paper) threatened the entire financial system.
.. Despite this, Dodd-Frank has crippled government’s ability to defuse future financial crises. It has restricted government’s “ability to act as a lender of last resort.” The Fed’s power to lend to individual institutions is curtailed, making it harder to nip future crises in the bud. The Fed can’t act until many institutions are in trouble. Consequently, we are “even less prepared to deal with a crisis” than in 2007.
.. The real Dodd-Frank scandal is that this misinterpretation of events, widely embraced by both parties, has been allowed to stand. In many bailouts, banks’ shareholders suffered huge losses or were wiped out; similarly, top managers lost their jobs. The point was not to protect them but to prevent a collapse of the financial system.
If the Trump administration doesn’t repudiate the conventional wisdom and change the law accordingly, it risks creating a future, self-inflicted wound.
The world’s losers are revolting, and Brexit is only the beginning
From Mexico to Argentina, Thailand to South Korea, Hong Kong to Indonesia, and, eventually, the United States to southern Europe, these capital flows magnified the economy’s boom-bust cycle, with an emphasis on the bust.
.. They warned that Turkey is about to join the E.U. — it’s not — and flood the country with immigrants. They said that Europe’s refugee crisis has pushed them to a “breaking point” in a poster reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. And they promised to earmark the funds now being sent to the E.U. for what they claim is the overburdened-by-immigrants National Health Services instead. Never mind that they overstated how much money that’d be by a factor of two. Their basic argument was that Britain could only stop this influx of immigrants if it ditched the E.U. and its rules mandating the free movement of people and that the elites had failed the people by forgetting there was a Britain outside of London.
.. First, they’d have to change all the money in their economy, and, second, every other euro country would worry that they’d be next. That, in turn, would set off a slow-motion bank run across Southern Europe as people tried to get ahold of their euros before they could be turned into, say, liras that wouldn’t be worth anywhere near as much. It’d be the mother-of-all financial crises. Which is why German, French, Spanish and Italian stock markets all fell much further than Britain’s did after it voted to leave. Indeed, those markets dropped 6.8, 8.0, 12.4 and 12.5 percent, respectively, on Friday, while Britain’s “only” declined 3.2 percent.
.. Brexit, it turns out, is more about Europe than it is about Britain.
.. Brexit really might be the end of the E.U. if France and Italy follow Britain out the door; it might also be the end of the U.K. if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide they’d rather be part of the E.U. (or what’s left of it); and it might even be the end of our era of economic integration if it helps propel populists to power across the continent who only care about putting their people “first.”
.. Its second one was ignoring the evidence that things were indeed going bad just as predicted, and blaming irresponsible governments instead. And its last one was all but blackmailing governments into slashing their budgets out of the misguided belief that this would get their sputtering economies growing again. It didn’t. It was the economic equivalent of tossing a drowning person an anchor instead of a lifeline, because you thought they needed to get stronger and not bailed out.
.. The liberal international order isn’t working for too many people, but, on balance, most economists would say it’s still worth fighting for. After all, there are much worse alternatives.