Economics

In December 2016 I was speaking at a conference in London. Much of the discussion, unsurprisingly, gravitated toward Donald Trump’s recent election as president. It meant, I noted, that an outspoken free-trade skeptic would be in the White House. At that point a bright young French economist turned to me and said, ‘Mon ami, I thought that free trade was a done deal on the right. Apparently, it isn’t.’ As it turns out, it wasn’t just free trade that much of the American right was on the brink of rejecting. A systematic questioning of the central place assumed by free markets in conservative thought and policies since the 1970s, in the United States and the broader Anglosphere, was well underway.

Can Donald Trump weather the spate of bad news that’s coming his way? Trump remains enmeshed in a battle over his prediction that Alabama would be socked by Hurricane Dorian, but what could really upend his presidency is the new report that job creation was a measly 130,000 in August and that the manufacturing industry is taking a hit because of his trade war with China. True to form, Trump is trying to blame someone rather than himself.Last week, he claimed that American businesses are at fault. They’re 'badly run and weak', he claimed. An odd stance for a Republican president to adopt, for sure. Today, he went back to an old reliable, the Federal Reserve, in — what else?