Policy and Government                

Peter Navarro call your office: Tariffs spiking US trade deficit.

Carla Herreria at HuffPost  compiles a list of some of the things that will cost (a lot) more under the Navarro-Lighthizer Tariffs, curated from ustr.gov:

Starting in September:

Clothes including suits, coats, jackets, pants, dresses, accessories and underwear

• Umbrellas
• Ovens and stoves
• Beef and chicken
• Ketchup
• Cheese
• Chocolate
• Bed linen
• Blankets
• Curtains

Starting in December:

• Cellphones, laptops, computer monitors, keyboards, headphones and speakers
• Athletic shoes, boots and waterproof shoes
• Christmas decorations
• Handbags
• Picture frames
• Toys
• Fishing rods and poles
• Diapers
• Combs
• Umbrellas
• Video games and consoles

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Liaquat Ahamed in the August 26th New Yorker with a long, thoughtful meditation, headlined The Rich Can’t Get Richer Forever, Can They?, on cycles of wealth inequality to Binyamin Appelbaum’s “’The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.’ It is a tale that has been told before, but Appelbaum adds flesh to the narrative by recounting it through the lives and careers of a small group of economists associated with the University of Chicago—including the Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and Robert Mundell—who were behind the shift.

“Another of the colorful characters who populate “The Economists’ Hour” is Robert Mundell. Appelbaum credits him with providing the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of a single currency—making him in effect the intellectual father of the euro—and of supply-side economics. In the late sixties, convinced that inflation was heading upward, Mundell bought a run-down fifteenth-century palazzo in the Tuscan countryside for ten thousand dollars. He turned out to be right about inflation, and later claimed to have multiplied his investment a hundredfold. Yet, three decades later, when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he was still shovelling cash into his Italian money pit.

“‘The Economists’ Hour’ is a reminder of the power of ideas to shape the course of history, a heartening thought for those of us in the ideas business.

Veronique de Rugy at The American Spectator holds that “President Donald Trump has a remarkably large number of supporters among the voters and pundits who label themselves as “free market.” They usually say something like, “Sure, I don’t like his trade and immigration policies, but the rest are good.” I disagree. With the exception of a few policies, the Trump presidency — aided by a largely GOP Congress — will end up being, by a large margin, a very pro-government-intervention administration. This is not about assessing the president’s personality, behavior or impact on the “presidency”: It’s about economic policy.”

Monetary

From CNBC, Larry Summers blasts ex-Fed president’s call to oust Trump.

At Forbes.com, Bob Haber discusses the media’s newfound infatuation with gold.

Yale reflects on Bretton Woods with political scientist Ian Shapiro.