Donald Trump embodies the spirit of our age
Even ultimate failure would not invalidate his claim to be a truly historic president
Gideon Rachman
When Donald Trump spoke at the UN last month, the audience laughed at him. It was an unprecedented insult to an American president. But I have an uneasy suspicion that Mr Trump may have the last laugh. The 45th US president could yet go down as a leader who changed the course of history and embodied the spirit of an age.
Historic figures do not have to be good people, or even particularly intelligent. Mr Trump is a habitual liar, whose administration has set up detention camps for children. Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of state, is reputed to have called the president a “moron”. But none of that need stop Mr Trump from being what the philosopher Georg Hegel called a “world-historical figure”.
The quintessential world-historical figure of Hegel’s era was Napoleon, whom the German thinker described as the “world spirit on horseback”. Oddly, the best definition I have read of what Hegel meant by that term, came from the current president of France. Emmanuel Macron told Der Spiegel that “Hegel viewed ‘great men’ as instruments of something far greater . . . He believed that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist (world spirit) for a moment, but also that the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so.”
I doubt Mr Trump has much to say about Hegel. But he may be the kind of instinctive statesman that Hegel described — a figure who has harnessed and embodied forces that he himself only half-understands. By contrast I fear that Mr Macron, learned though he is, currently looks more like the embodiment of a dying order.
If future historians do indeed decide that Mr Trump was a historic figure, what might they say?
First, that he broke decisively with the elite consensus about how the US should handle its relationship with the rest of the world. Previous presidents had either denied the erosion in American power, or sought quietly to manage it. By contrast, Mr Trump acknowledged American decline — and sought to reverse it. His method was to use US power more overtly and brutally, in an effort to rewrite the rules of the global order to America’s advantage, before it was too late.
In particular, Mr Trump decided that globalisation, embraced by all his predecessors, was actually a terrible idea that was weakening America’s relative power and eroding the living standards of its people. After more than 30 years of stagnant or declining real wages, the American people were receptive to that message. Unconstrained by the politeness of his predecessors, Mr Trump bullied friends as well as enemies.
With his instinctively zero-sum approach to the world, Mr Trump also decided that a richer and more powerful China was obviously bad news for America — and became the first president to try to block China’s rise. Whether or not this is a good idea, it is undoubtedly a historic development, reversing more than 40 years of American foreign policy, which has sought to integrate China into a US-led global order.
On the domestic front, future historians might note that Mr Trump was the first president to notice the huge gap that had opened up between elite American opinion and that of the wider public — on a range of issues from immigration, to trade, to identity politics. As a candidate and then as president, he ruthlessly and effectively exploited these divisions. Mr Trump said and did things that conventional analysts regarded as political suicide. But his instincts proved better than those of the pundits. Despite his age, Mr Trump also “got” new media — and exploited it far more adeptly than other politicians.
But will all this radicalism be crowned with success? As Hegel pointed out, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk”, which is a fancy way of saying it is too soon to tell.
However, from a Trumpian perspective, the early signs are promising. The US economy is booming, while China’s economy is sputtering. The US Supreme Court has been reshaped. Under crushing American pressure, Canada and Mexico have agreed to rewrite their trade deal with America — and other US allies are showing signs of falling into line. Whatever the results of the midterm elections next month, Mr Trump stands a good chance of re-election in 2020.
Of course, it could all still go wrong. And, as an establishment kind of guy, I’m inclined to think it will. The Trump trade wars could backfire. The US economy could overheat and the stock market could tank.
In the event of another global financial crisis, a Trump-led US will struggle to lead a co-ordinated global response. If the Trump administration continues to undermine America’s alliance system, US power could erode even faster than before. In the worst case, Mr Trump’s instinctive risk-taking style could lead to a major miscalculation — and a war with China or Russia or on the Korean peninsula.
But even ultimate failure and disaster would not invalidate Mr Trump’s claim to be a truly historic president. The president may think that greatness is all about “winning”. But Hegel suggested that things usually end badly for world historical figures: “They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar; or transported to St Helena like Napoleon.” A cheering thought for Mr Trump’s many foes.
DONALD TRUMP EMBODIES THE SPIRIT OF OUR AGE / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
AFTER AMERICA´S ELECTIONS: THE MID-TERMS PRODUCE A DIVIDED GOVERNMENT FOR A DIVIDED COUNTRY / THE ECONOMIST
After America’s elections
The mid-terms produce a divided government for a divided country
A recipe for gridlock, poor governance and disenchantment with the political system
FOR ONCE, the outcome that was predicted actually occurred. Democrats took the House of Representatives in America’s mid-term elections on November 6th, and will provide some welcome oversight of the White House when members of the new Congress take their seats in January. Republicans held the Senate—with a bigger majority, which will make presidential appointments easier to confirm. Both sides declared victory. A starkly divided country now has a divided government. Underpinning the results, though, is the deepening of a structural shift in American politics that will make the country harder to govern for the foreseeable future. Democrats represent a majority of America’s voters, but Republicans dominate geographically.
Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives by a comfortable margin. Their position as the party that enjoys most support among Americans, thanks to its strength in urban centres, was reinforced by a surge in support from the suburbs, where revulsion with President Donald Trump was evident. Meanwhile Republicans tightened their grip on less populous, more rural states, easily beating Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. In a country where one chamber of the legislature is based on population and the other on territory, this division is a recipe for gridlock, poor governance and, eventually, disenchantment with the political system itself.
The breadth of the divide is striking. Ten years ago there were 17 states with one Republican senator and one Democratic one. From January 2019 there will be just seven. In federal elections hardly any candidates seem able to survive in opposition-party territory. Only six Democratic senators won their elections in states carried by Mr Trump in 2016. The picture is less stark for governors, but in statehouses the pattern reasserts itself. From January Minnesota will be the only state where one chamber is controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans. The last time that was the case was back in 1914.
This equilibrium may be stable, but it is damaging for the country and for both parties. For the Republicans, the danger is a long-term one. For now, they hold the White House and have an increased majority in the Senate. But in a two-party system, a party that prevails while consistently failing to capture a majority of votes will one day find it is no longer seen as exercising power legitimately by a majority of voters. For the Democrats, the challenge is immediate. They may rail against a system that disadvantages them in structural ways, but cannot change that system until they can work out how to win within it. Running up vast vote shares in New York and California is all very well, but on its own will not deliver a governing majority.
What is the way out of this impasse? The main onus is now on the Democrats. For their own good, not to mention the country’s, they have to find ways to appeal in America’s heartland.
That starts with exercising restraint. Yes, they should use their majority in the House to scrutinise a president who shows contempt for the norms that have constrained past presidents.
They should look carefully at what has been going on in federal agencies, and investigate possible presidential abuses of power or misuse of the office for personal aggrandisement. But Democrats should resist the urge to use their majority in the House to take revenge, hounding the president in the way that Newt Gingrich and his Republican colleagues once hounded Bill Clinton. Prosecution should be left to prosecutors. It is not obvious, for instance, that there would be much to gain by investigating the circumstances of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. There is certainly no ground to impeach him, as some Democrats want.
A second Democratic priority should be to show that they have the ideas and capacity for governing that can appeal to a broader swathe of voters. One way to do so is to make a good-faith effort to work with the president and the Republicans. There are deals to be done on infrastructure and on drug prices. They also need to make immigration less toxic (see article).
In 2010, when Republicans won the House during Barack Obama’s presidency and proceeded to block everything Democrats wanted to do, the White House argued that it was unjust for half of one branch of the federal government to stand in the way of everything else. That was right then and it is right now. House Democrats should not declare, as Mitch McConnell once did, that they will oppose everything the president does. There should be no repeat of the hostage-taking that saw the Republican House flirt with a sovereign default during Mr Obama’s second term.
Plenty of Democrats will counsel against holding back, arguing that the scorched-earth strategy that the Republicans used when they had a majority in the House worked perfectly well for them. Why, they will ask, should Democrats be the party of compromise in the name of better government, when their opponents have so often refused to give an inch?
For two reasons. First, it might just yield results. Admittedly, Mr Trump’s recent behaviour does not bode well. Accusing Democrats of facilitating the murder of policemen, as he did in the closing stages of the campaign, is not the best way to foster bipartisan spirits. Mr Trump could give up on the idea of signing any legislation in the next two years, preferring to rule by executive order, while ranting against the opposition.
But he may also surprise, proving more willing to deal with Democrats than other Republican presidents have been. The Trump motivating principle is self-interest rather than party loyalty. He has proved willing to discard some long-standing party positions, for good and ill. The role of dealmaker-in-chief could rather suit his ego.
Second, even if bipartisan efforts fail, behaving responsibly is in Democrats’ long-term interests. By and large, Democrats want the federal government to work well. Republicans, by contrast, still consider the words “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” to be a micro-aggression. Gridlock does nothing for confidence in government, which is something Democrats need if they are to win more voters’ confidence. Like it or not, they have more to lose from dysfunction than Republicans do.
THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IS IMPEDING DEVELOPMENT / PROJECT SYNDICATE
The Digital Divide Is Impeding Development
Mukhisa Kituyi
By the end of the next decade, growth, productivity gains, and human development will be determined by levels of integration into the digital economy. To guard against new forms of inequality, the international community must do more to help developing countries close the connectivity gap.
GENEVA – It is easy to assume that access to the digital economy is ubiquitous, and that online shopping is the natural evolution of commerce. For example, in July, Amazon sold more than 100 million products to consumers worldwide during its annual Prime Day event, a $4.2 billion bonanza that included sales of table salt in India, Coke Zero in Singapore, and toothbrushes in China.
But figures like these mask the fact that for many people in developing countries, the road to e-commerce is riddled with potholes. Simply put, the growth of e-commerce is not automatic, and the spread of its benefits is not guaranteed.
Some of the obstacles are logistical. On the tiny South Pacific island of Tuvalu, for example, fewer than ten streets in the capital, Funafuti, are named, and only about 100 homes have a postal address. Even if everyone in Tuvalu had access to the Internet (which they don’t; only 13% of the country’s population had broadband in 2016, according to the World Bank), delivery of goods purchased online would be difficult.
Elsewhere, billions of people lack bank accounts and credit cards, and in many developing countries, consumer-protection laws do not extend to goods purchased online. These challenges are particularly acute for people in Sub-Saharan Africa, in remote island states, and in several landlocked countries.
By contrast, in most developed economies, well-functioning postal systems and strong legal frameworks mean that products can be purchased online and delivered without a second thought.
But e-commerce is only one facet of the evolving digital economy. Innovation, production, and sales are all being transformed by technology platforms, data analytics, 3D printing, and the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). By 2030, the number of IoT-connected devices is expected to reach 125 billion, compared to 27 billion in 2017. Moreover, this rapid pace of digital tethering is occurring even as half the world’s population remains unconnected from the Internet.
If left unaddressed, the yawning gap between under-connected and hyper-digitalized countries will widen, exacerbating existing inequalities. Levels of digitalization may even influence whether countries are able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals set by the international community for tackling challenges like hunger, disease, and climate change. That is why I believe more must be done to support poor countries as they strive to integrate into the digital economy.
How that economy will develop is difficult to predict. But we already know that actions taken by governments, donors, and development partners will determine the way forward. One effort – the Going Digital project, launched by the OECD in 2017 – is helping countries seize opportunities and prepare for technological disruption. Areas of focus include competition, consumer protection, innovation and entrepreneurship, insurance and pensions, education, governance, and trade. It is a holistic approach that specialists in development cooperation should emulate.
Moreover, by the end of the next decade, information and communication technology (ICT) will drive economic growth and power productivity gains. To thrive, people will need new skills and knowledge, and countries will require updated policies to protect online users. Small companies, including those owned and operated by women, will be especially vulnerable to the changing business environment.
Unfortunately, only 1% of all funding provided by Aid for Trade – an initiative by World Trade Organization members to help developing countries improve their trading infrastructure – is currently being allocated to ICT solutions. Similarly, multilateral development banks are investing just 1% of their total spending on ICT projects, and only about 4% of this limited investment is being spent on policy development, work that is critical if digital economies are to be well regulated.
At my organization, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, we are creating strategies to help developing countries leverage their assets and improve digital capabilities. One initiative, “eTrade for all,” is aimed at making it easier for developing countries to source financial and technical assistance. Since the program’s inception two years ago, nearly 30 global partners have been recruited, and an online platform has linked governments with organizations and donors to share resources, expertise, and knowledge.
The G20 is also planting its flag on this issue; in August, I joined G20 ministers in Argentina to discuss what can be done to spread the benefits of the digital transformation. Needless to say, the meeting could not have come at a better time.
Still, while programs and summits can offer the world’s developing and least-developed countries a place to start in their push for greater connectivity, more support is needed if we are ever to close the digital divide. With billions of people still below the first rung of the digital ladder, the climb to prosperity is becoming more challenging than ever.
Mukhisa Kituyi is Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
THE PROS ARE PREDICTING AN IMMINENT SQUEEZE HIGHER IN STOCKS - WHAT SAY YOU? / SEEKING ALPHA
The Pros Are Predicting An Imminent Squeeze Higher In Stocks - What Say You?
by: The Heisenberg
- On the heels of the U.S. midterm elections, multiple desks and several high profile names are calling for a squeeze higher in equities.
- The arguments range from the nebulous to the trenchant, and taken together, the case is compelling.
- Or is it? I'm not so sure, and for those of you who like being contrarians, I'll give you some ammo.
- This post contains all the usual detail and in-depth analysis you've come to expect and should serve as a helpful guide going into year-end.
If Republicans lose either the House or Senate, SG strategists would expect more volatility on risk assets and a rising risk premium. The political and economic agenda has driven the financial markets for the past two years – so political gridlock and uncertainty will not come without pain.
In the very short term, we expect to see volatility compression and the S&P500 term structure to continue to normalize. Longer term, we expect the trend in equity volatility to be higher.


Inflation is on track for a meaningful overshoot of the Fed’s 2% target. In our baseline forecast of 2.3% for core PCE by late 2019, that overshoot remains within the Fed’s likely comfort zone. But we see the risks to this forecast as tilted to a bigger increase. The economy really needs to slow to avoid a dangerous overheating.
I continue to expect a near-term tactical pain-trade HIGHER for U.S. Equities, almost entirely due to the past month’s gashing of “market” exposure from the fundamental community throughout the performance drawdown, which has forced “net-down” / “gross-down” / “beta-down” behavior (which accelerated particularly over the final week of October).
The “fundamental” active Equities universe then has essentially become a source of synthetic “short gamma” in the market, as with any rally in stocks, said performance-burned funds effectively “get shorter” the higher Equities travel, in turn contributing to these violent bear market rallies on “up” days, with funds grabbing exposure “dynamically hedging” futures on said move.
Our CTA model already shows Equities exposure again being added WoW in SPX, Nasdaq, Nikkei, ASX (while also reducing their HSCEI “short” and over their “buy signal” in HSI after today), while our Risk Parity model too shows +$2.1B of “adds” in global Equities vs 2 weeks ago.
Short convexity of market makers is rapidly declining and may turn long. This should be positive as it will bring back intraday reversion as opposed to momentum. This reduces realized volatility, and many investors will misconstrue this as a return of the ‘buy the dip’ environment. Realized volatility is expected to decline. Systematic investors (such as vol targeters) will start rebuilding positions into year-end. Implied volatility has declined, with the VIX term structure reverting to contango. For some strategies this is a positive signal. Next week, 1M price momentum will turn positive for most equity indices globally (1M ‘anniversary’ of the crash), and may lead to CTA inflows or short covering.

WHO DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE STRONG U.S. ECONOMY? / PROJECT SYNDICATE
Who Deserves Credit for the Strong US Economy?
Michael J. Boskin
Although US President Donald Trump is prone to hyperbole, he is not wrong to tout the strength of the US economy on his watch. But while Trump's regulatory and tax policies have been good for growth, his efforts to attach his name to the economy all but ensure that he will bear the blame in the event of a downturn.
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STANFORD – US President Donald Trump claims credit for “the greatest ever” economy, and constantly contrasts economic conditions today with the historically weak recovery under President Barack Obama. With growth this year over 3%, unemployment at 3.7%, and more job openings than unemployed people, the economy has greatly improved on Trump’s watch. The macroeconomic indicators are the best in decades.
Meanwhile, Obama, too, claims credit for the strong economy, arguing that his policies prevented a far worse downturn following the 2008 financial crisis. Neither Trump’s hyperbole nor Obama’s selective memory comes as a surprise.
American presidents, like star athletes in team sports, get both too much credit and too much blame from voters and historians for what happens on their watch. Most presidential policies must be enacted by Congress, which often alters or blocks them. And many other factors are constantly at work, not least the US Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. So far, the Fed’s policies under its new chairman, Jerome Powell, have been spot on; but that hasn’t stopped Trump from publicly complaining that interest rates are rising too rapidly. While unusual, Trump’s griping pales in comparison to President Jimmy Carter’s nationally televised admonition to the Fed to lower interest rates in the midst of the raging inflation of the late 1970s.
Of equal importance are economic and political events in the rest of the world, technological and demographic forces at home and abroad, and the policies of previous administrations, which can expand or constrain a sitting president’s options. For example, President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation from Carter. President George H.W. Bush inherited a Latin American debt crisis and a savings-and-loan disaster that had been brewing for more than a decade. To their credit, Reagan and Bush both saw the problems before them and supported successful responses, despite the predictable political costs of the downturn that followed each episode.
For his part, President Bill Clinton inherited low inflation and a revived financial system. After the Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm election, Clinton worked with them to balance the budget and reform welfare. Then came President George W. Bush, who inherited a legacy of insufficient national-defense spending. Early in his presidency, the attacks of September 11, 2001, laid bare the need to rebuild the military and improve homeland security. Finally, Obama inherited the financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. But he then presided over the weakest economic recovery since World War II, owing partly to his attempts to reengineer vast swaths of the economy.
These American examples are tame compared to others in recent history. In Central and Eastern Europe, post-Cold War reformers had to manage the transition from a decrepit centrally planned socialist system to a free-market economy. Whoever eventually succeeds President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela will inherit the unmitigated economic and social disaster that is Chavism.
Returning to 2018, the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era regulations and enactment of corporate-tax reform have both helped to promote growth. Trump’s trade policy, however, is risky. If it proves successful in opening up China’s market and curtailing technology transfers from US companies, then it will have been constructive. But if it precipitates a long-term trade war, it could do serious damage.
Trump often takes presidential exaggeration to new heights with his common refrain that, “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.” But this is not to say that past presidents have eschewed such hyperbole. For example, after repeatedly invoking “shovel-ready” projects to pass his February 2009 stimulus bill, Obama later admitted “…there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project.” And his pledge that Obamacare guaranteed that patients could keep their health plan and doctor received “four Pinocchios”, the worst possible rating, from the Washington Post fact checker.
Obama has also claimed that nobody knew how bad the Great Recession was going to be. And yet, immediately after his election, I pointed out that, “This recession is the real thing, far worse than the two brief, mild recessions of the last quarter-century.” Later, Obama expressed regrets that he had not communicated earlier just how bad the recession would be and that if he had, perhaps he could have made the stimulus bill much larger. But if nobody knew how bad it was going to be, how could it have been communicated earlier?
Obama seems to have conveniently forgotten that his first term budgets repeatedly estimated growth above 4% for the next several years. That is double what was actually achieved. Clearly, his advisers either didn’t have an accurate read on the economy, or they were wildly optimistic about the efficacy of his policies. Since then, they have fallen back on a discredited theory of “secular stagnation” to explain the tepid recovery.
As a result, when Trump came to office, he inherited a national debt that had doubled on Obama’s watch, rapidly rising interest rates, and unfunded Social Security and Medicare costs. Under these conditions, Trump’s biggest and boldest policy proposals will likely run into budgetary constraints. He has already ruled out any changes to Social Security. His and congressional Republicans’ attempts to replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and to curtail the growth in Medicaid spending, have been unsuccessful. And a temporary increase in defense spending will revert back to insufficient levels after this fiscal year.
Although the tax package that Trump signed into law last December front-loaded tax cuts and is now helping the economy to grow, government revenue has yet to respond much to that growth. Unfortunately, growing deficits mean it will be hard to make the legislation’s personal tax cuts permanent any time soon.
In the event of a downturn, voters will be quicker to blame Trump than they have been in giving him credit for today’s boom. Given all of the president’s efforts to attach his name to the current economy, it will not be easy for him to shift the blame to the Fed, Democrats, or anyone else.
Michael J. Boskin is Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was Chairman of George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1993, and headed the so-called Boskin Commission, a congressional advisory body that highlighted errors in official US inflation estimates.
PAUL VOLCKER SETS A CHALLENGE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
Paul Volcker sets a challenge for the next generation
The former Fed chair wants attention to public service to be part of his legacy
Gillian Tett
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Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, in 2008 © Getty
Last week, I received a poignant invitation: Paul Volcker, the legendary former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, asked me to visit his apartment to discuss his legacy.
Mr Volcker is publishing his memoir. The release of Keeping At It was initially scheduled for late November but the publisher has rushed the date forward to October because the former Fed chair is ill. So the towering figure of finance wanted to share some thoughts — and warnings — to current and future policymakers, politicians, voters and investors.
The message is sobering. Some of the points on Mr Volcker’s mind involve finance and economics. No surprise there. As Fed chair in the 1970s hecrushed inflation and, after the 2008 financial crisis, he helped to craft reforms, as economic adviser to Barack Obama’s White House. His memoir explains in lively detail how he (and others) spent the second half of the 20th century experimenting with different policy tools, to deal with the crumbling postwar Bretton Woods global economic order.
This is partly a tale of 20th-century financial policy innovation — and progress. But not entirely. Mr Volcker thinks that there are three areas where progress is going into reverse.
First, he is uneasy about the 21st-century central banking fashion — or obsession — for chasing a 2 per cent inflation target. He thinks it is “ridiculous to be worrying about the [fine details] of 1.75 per cent or 2 per cent” price growth. He suggests central banks would do better to chase price stability, since deflationary dangers are overstated.
Second, he is uneasy about the risks to the financial system unleashed by the past decade of experimental quantitative easing policies: “There’s a lot of leverage going on now, a lot of debt . . . interest rates are very low,” he observed, predicting that someone of my age (51) will probably see “at least two” more financial crises.
That threat of another crisis is exacerbated by a third point: a decade after the credit crunch, financiers are slipping back into bad habits, he fears, chasing “chicanery” and lobbying to loosen regulation, such as the “ Volcker rule” he authored to curb proprietary trading after 2008.
These are important warnings. Many observers were not fans of the Volcker rule. Others might disagree with his views on QE. But he is entirely correct to warn about the wider dangers of financial reform backsliding and the distortions unleashed by QE. Let us hope he will be heeded.
More surprising is that, when Mr Volcker thinks about his message to the next generation, it is not finance or economics that is at the top of his mind. On the contrary, he emphasises, “I would like my legacy to be some attention to public service.”
Mr Volcker fears that, as the 21st century wears on, society is abandoning the 20th-century idea that government should be valued and supported, particularly in America. “When I grew up good government was a good slogan,” he says, pointing out that public service was so respected in the 1950s that courses in “public administration” commanded high status at universities such as Princeton.
“But now the phrase ‘good government’ is a mockery,” he laments. Universities have effectively abandoned practical public administration training, focusing instead on “policy”. Few students want to make the type of financial sacrifices that Mr Volcker did for many decades, in the name of public service.
He has tried to fight back, by launching initiatives to champion public administration education. But it has “been a struggle”, he admits. “I thought I could raise money for this from these guys who had billions. No! They are all anti-government and don’t care. It’s a losing proposition.”
This is alarming and important — not least because the issue is so rarely discussed. After all, if there were ever a time when the US needs effective public administration to handle problems ranging from climate change to education — or even just to referee free market solutions — it is now. But, as the author Michael Lewis describes in The Fifth Risk, the administration of President Donald Trump is, at best, uninterested in the functions of government. At worst, it is deliberately hostile to them.
The neglect and hostility is creating visible risks: Mr Trump’s recent attacks on the Fed, say, could undermine its credibility. Mr Lewis’s book describes less visible threats too, such as the dangerous impact on the nuclear sector of this indifference.
Let us hope the publication of Mr Volcker’s memoir will draw attention to the issue of how to make government more credible, popular and effective. Perhaps, in discussions about Mr Volcker’s legacy, some benefactors will respond by creating programmes to make public administration more exciting. We need the next generation of Volckers.
But the truth is that, at the age of 91, Mr Volcker doubts he will live to see this debate about public service. “I hope people listen,” he said, as I finally left his apartment, with a lump in my throat. “But will they?” It is a lament — and a timely challenge.
Bienvenida
Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con artículos, análisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas económicos, financieros y políticos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su máximo interés, utilidad y conveniencia.
Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro.
Gonzalo Raffo de Lavalle
Friedrich Nietzsche
Quien conoce su ignorancia revela la mas profunda sabiduría. Quien ignora su ignorancia vive en la mas profunda ilusión.
Lao Tse
“There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
Warren Buffett
No soy alguien que sabe, sino alguien que busca.
FOZ
Only Gold is money. Everything else is debt.
J.P. Morgan
Las grandes almas tienen voluntades; las débiles tan solo deseos.
Proverbio Chino
Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada.
Helenio Herrera
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx
If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Sun Tzu
Paulo Coelho

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