USA: Paul Krugman dissects the staggering ignorance of the Trump White House - by Janet Allon

Is the Trump White House evil or just stupid? The answer to that burning question is, well, both. In Monday’s column, Paul Krugman takes as his subject the incompetence piece, which is evident in matters both large and seemingly trivial.

Though when you can’t be bothered to learn how you should address the Prime Minister of Japan, or the relatively simple fact that in Asia, the order of names is reversed, it seems more than a little representative of a certain incurious attitude. Trump addressed Abe Shinzo as Prime Minister Shinzo, the equivalent of calling Trump President Donald.  “Trivial?” 

Krugman asks. “Well, it would be if it were an isolated instance. But it isn’t.” In fact it appears that for both the Republican-led Congress and the clowns in the White House, ignorance is seen as a kind of strength.

Examples abound, per Krugman.

We see this on legal matters: In a widely quoted analysis, the legal expert Benjamin Wittes described the infamous executive order on refugees as “malevolence tempered by incompetence,” and noted that the order reads “as if it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all” — which is a good way to lose in court . . .

We see it on national security matters, where the president continues to rely on a chief adviser who, suspicious closeness to the Kremlin aside, appears to get his strategic information from right-wing conspiracy theorists . . . 

We see it on education, where the hearings for Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, revealed her to be completely ignorant about even the most elementary issues . . . We see it on diplomacy. How hard is it to ask someone from the State Department to make sure that the White House gets foreign leaders’ names right?

Too hard, apparently: Before the Abe flub, the official agenda for the state visit by Theresa May, the British prime minister, repeatedly misspelled her name.

Read more: Paul Krugman dissects the staggering ignorance of the Trump White House - Salon.com

EMU: Paul Krugman: "Stop listening to the deficit scolds — they’ve lost all credibility"

Five years after the country embarked on a harsh, internationally-imposed austerity regime, Greece suffers from sky-high unemployment and plummeting wages.

Moreover, Krugman notes, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio has actually gotten worse, largely because dramatic cutbacks have sent Greek GDP plunging.

Amid this sorry economic climate, the Greek ruling class could soon face a reckoning. As Krugman writes, polls show the left-wing anti-austerity party Syriza poised to win control in a general election, which the center-right government is desperately trying to avoid.

While Syriza avoids the xenophobia and extremism that define other anti-establishment parties in Europe, Krugman observes that its rise has occurred as extremist parties like France’s National Front and Italy’s Northern League have seen their political fortunes improve.

“This is what happens when an elite claims the right to rule based on its supposed expertise, its understanding of what must be done — then demonstrates both that it does not, in fact, know what it is doing, and that it is too ideologically rigid to learn from its mistakes,” Krugman writes.

Therein lies the real lesson Greece provides.

Read more: Paul Krugman: Stop listening to the deficit scolds — they’ve lost all credibility - Salon.com

NYT - China - World Out of Balance - Paul Krugman 2008 Noble Prize Winner of Economics

Paul Krugman

For the complete report from the NYTimes.com click on this link

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. Nobody expects President Obama to come back from China with major new agreements, on economic policy or anything else. Most of the world’s major currencies “float” against one another. China is the great exception. Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy — forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China’s currency — Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They’ve done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities. And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China’s currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

But why do I say that this problem is about to get much worse? Because for the past year the true scale of the China problem has been masked by temporary factors. Looking forward, we can expect to see both China’s trade surplus and America’s trade deficit surge. That, at any rate, is the argument made in a new paper by Richard Baldwin and Daria Taglioni of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. As they note, trade imbalances, both China’s surplus and America’s deficit, have recently been much smaller than they were a few years ago. But, they argue, “these global imbalance improvements are mostly illusory — the transitory side effect of the greatest trade collapse the world has ever seen.”