That finding cuts against the triumphalist narrative of Beijing’s industrial targeting. Instead of turbocharging efficiency, subsidies and credit direction are propping up low-productivity firms and starving higher-productivity ones of capital. A 1.2% TFP drag sounds small, but

That assumes depreciation solves the fiscal squeeze, but it’s a blunt and dangerous lever. A weaker dollar does inflate away some debt in real terms and props up exports, but it also raises the cost of imports, pushes up inflation, and risks foreign holders of Treasuries

Trump has already issued nearly 200 executive orders in 2025 alone, more than some presidents managed in a full four years! open.substack.com/pub/monetaryco…

Huh, it’s almost like he wants to be sole authority everyone else has to listen to… I wonder if there’s a word for when someone leads like that. I wonder if historically they’ve been good or really bad & evil. Surely people wouldn’t vote for a guy like that though. Certainly not

Dealers are barely taking anything down at the long end because real-money buyers are swallowing the supply outright. A 4.5% dealer allotment at the 30-year TIPS auction is unprecedented, meaning pensions, insurers and asset managers are willing to lock in long-dated real yields

In sectors like agriculture, hospitality, or construction, sudden surges of unauthorized labor do increase supply and can hold down pay at the very bottom. But nationally, the effect is usually swamped by other forces like union weakness, monopsony, and trade shocks. Empirical

Even with full employment, U.S. workers are taking home a shrinking slice of national income, showing capital’s structural dominance. open.substack.com/pub/monetaryco…

Firms are hoarding workers after struggling so badly to hire in 2021–22, so separations stay low even as hiring slows. It’s a tight market, but not necessarily a healthy one.

If Powell today leans too confident on achieving the 2% inflation goal, he risks losing credibility when the stickier prints keep coming in closer to 3%. If he hedges, markets will read it as dovish drift. The real issue is that the Fed has talked itself into a world where

Overall, Powell’s speech reads less like resolve and more like managing optics while inflation data still aren’t cleanly converging. He emphasized progress toward 2% and leaned into disinflation, but he wrapped it in so many caveats about vigilance, data-dependence and not

In effect, the Fed just clawed back discretion it lost under the 2020 framework, and that tilts policy more hawkish in the medium term, even if near-term cuts are still in play.

Waste of time. Furniture is a low-margin, labor-intensive import sector where the U.S. long ago ceded capacity to Asia. A probe won’t bring back domestic production at scale; it’ll just raise prices on consumers and squeeze retailers who rely on those supply chains. If Trump

That’s the consensus view, but it underestimates how path-dependent China’s system is. Aging usually pushes saving rates down as retirees dissave, but in China you’ve got weak social safety nets, high precautionary saving, and institutional incentives that funnel household

Robin Brooks The old QE backstop is gone. Without central banks absorbing duration, the market is repricing the true cost of fiscal profligacy, and it shows up as a global bear steepening.

This shows tariffs are acting as a tax on efficiency rather than a spur to investment in new capacity. Tariffs are supposed to stimulate domestic production, but here they’re accelerating adoption of labor-saving tech instead.