Connecting the Dots

When it comes to public sentiment, banks and Congress have a lot in common.

September is not unfolding as expected. Then again, as Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas hard. Much of Houston, our largest city, will be uninhabitable for months, maybe years.

Everyone is worried about robots. Elon Musk fears they will kill us all if we give them both deadly weapons and autonomy.

In June, the US ran a $32.6 billion “trade in goods” deficit with China. That’s the difference between our imports from China ($42.3 billion) and our exports to China ($9.7 billion), according to the US Census Bureau.

What do freight trains, oil supertankers, and the Trump administration’s trade plans have in common? Once they get going, they’re pretty much unstoppable.

10 years ago this summer, the world changed. The remarkable part is how quickly we forgot.

If you were to ask me what the most inefficient US market sector is, I would probably say, defense.

The first step to surviving a war is knowing which side you are on. But in a trade war, that’s not always easy.

Like him or not, you can’t deny that Donald Trump thinks big. All his ideas are huge, beautiful, unbelievable, fantastic.

Removing barriers to international trade has both upside and downside. Donald Trump is now president in part because he focused on the downside: lost US jobs, closed factories, blighted communities.

Top central bankers choose their words carefully. They know sending the wrong signals can unleash havoc, and they’ll get blamed for it. More important, as masters in acrobatic flip-flopping and backpedaling, they rarely promise a specific outcome.