April 2025
Wednesday, 16 April 2025
We have no bros and no oligarchs
Ulrich Ladurner and Bernd Ulrich: “This and more are all values that must be defended, and which show that Europe is more than a union. Europe is our home.”
Saturday, 12 April 2025
This is called “capital flight”
Noah Smith: “ If the dollar weakens, America will be able to afford fewer imports, and U.S. exports will be cheaper. […] If we balance our trade by making ourselves poorer, that’s not a good thing.”
Also: Treasuries Suddenly Trade Like Risky Assets in Warning to Trump: “An auction of 30-year bonds on Thursday also saw investors snap up $22 billion of the debt, supporting the argument that Treasuries continue to be attractive even during the selloff.”
Thursday, 10 April 2025
Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being
Noah Castelo, Kostadin Kushlev, Adrian F Ward, Michael Esterman, Peter B Reiner: “Humans evolved in a world where information, entertainment, and social contact were relatively hard to come by”
Wednesday, 9 April 2025
Manufacturing is a war now
Noah Smith: “If it comes to pass, it will mean that China is basically free to start any conventional conflict it wants, without worrying that it will be ganged up on — because there will be no possible gang big enough to beat it. The only thing they’ll have to fear is nuclear weapons.”
Sunday, 6 April 2025
Protesters Rally Against Trump and Musk Across the U.S.
Shaila Dewan, Minho Kim, and Katie Benner, The New York Times: “New York, the United States, is the melting pot. Like, what do we want? Like, not diversity, not inclusion?”
Friday, 4 April 2025
Congress has the power to halt Trump’s tariffs. But Republicans aren’t ready to use it.
Stephen Groves, AP: “Instead, they were focusing all their attention on advancing the president’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ of tax breaks and spending cuts …”
Also: The Day America Lost Everything
Thursday, 3 April 2025
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Paul Krugman: “Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally. […] One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and […] The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy”
Tired of Winning Yet?
Maia Mindel: “… the trade deficit is not a major problem for any economies: […] when a country has an inflow of currency due to trade, its economy has higher inflation, resulting in a stronger currency in real terms and therefore in a reduction of the deficit. So eventually, unless the government maintains it, the deficit would disappear and so would a surplus - except that tariffs would, as mentioned before, make the economy much poorer and smaller in order to achieve it.”
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Donald Trump and the Interests of Capital
Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money: “The first thing to always understand about the modern economy is the post New Deal creation of a functioning and stable economy was meant to help capital. Bringing workers into a junior partnership with the state was to help capital.”
An Insult to Life Itself?
Maia Mindel: “Technology doesn’t actually displace jobs it displaces some, if not all, of the tasks that those jobs do. So when people say ‘70% of jobs are at risk of automation’, what they actually mean is ‘70% of jobs contain tasks that could plausibly be automated’.”