Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

If the goal were really fighting forced labor, why sort 60 countries into just two flat rates? The uniformity gives the game away, and the courts are likely to notice—and, ultimately, sink this rationale for tariffs. But in the two years it takes to happen, the tariffs will be collected. Refunds will be partial and burdensome to obtain, and are not certain: Chief Justice Roberts...

A car company by revenue, a rounding error by profit, and a meme by market cap—and with $300,000B of global liquid financial assets, there is an insufficient short-selling kitty to make things consistent…

Three stories can justify Tesla at 24x its fundamental worth: a SpaceX merger put, bottomless fanboy enthusiasm, and the ghost of 2021. None of them should survive contact wi...

An expansion of the world-economic prosperous core countries from 900 million to 1.3 billion and of peripheral as share of core per capita income from 12% to 24% between 1990 and 2023 were absolutely wonderful things to see. But for the past decade, the relative income gap between core and periphery has not shrunk at all. It is not as bad as the 1820 to 1975 Great Diver...

Hormuz closure removed Gulf crude and LNG → emergency stocks were released, pipelines bypassed, and non-OPEC output plugged some of the gap → prices spiked, then partially retreated → but the adjustment happened vai drawdown and rationing, not new durable supply or permanently altered demand → buffers depleted and deplete and demand was destroyed and is destroyed (not satisfied)...

Charles Maier seems to think that he should be able to use his expertise as a historian to judge and offer at least possible scenarios for the future. I think he is a good enough historian that he ought to know that prediction is a trap. What history teaches us is not how to predict the future, but that from the perspective of any moment the future isthat will turn out to have h...