At Responsible Statecraft Michael Corbin remarks on the meeting of the BRICS+ nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and now Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE)—representing nearly 40% of global GDP and 45% of the world’s population:

Despite objections from some BRICS+ members, it seems as though de-dollarization is slowly moving towards an economic reality. According to the Jerusalem Post, China has already unveiled plans to use a gold-backed yuan and Russia is trading in currencies tied to gold. Together with the significant gold accumulation by BRICS countries, these actions suggest a world shifting away from dollar reliance. For example, the divergence between treasuries and gold as safe havens has signaled investors’ heightened uncertainty given skyrocketing government debt and their preference for physical assets. Over the last 10 years, central bank purchases of gold have significantly outpaced purchases of U.S. Treasuries.

The Kazan BRICS summit has demonstrated a considerably impressive level of ambition, no doubt fueled by Russia’s chairmanship and the many underlying financial and economic issues with which it is currently wrestling. Although Russian interests obviously are driving the current agenda, it is evident that the issues presented resonate strongly among a variety of countries, from global powers like China to nations throughout the Global South. They all share a common interest in navigating the emerging challenges presented by a rapidly developing multipolar architecture.

Although BRICS 2024 is unlikely to implement immediate solutions to its economic and finance proposals, it has already successfully generated enthusiasm for alternative approaches to the post-World War II order. After several decades of war and harmful sanctions, BRICS+ nations are increasingly distrustful of the United States led “rules-based order” that favors the few at the expense of many. Western nations should take notice that while BRICS will not immediately bring down the existing global architecture, it is a looming threat to the unrivaled dominance of its institutions, which no longer maintain the trust or confidence of a growing majority of the world’s inhabitants.

Shorter: we’ve screwed up. Not only have we screwed up but whether Harris or Trump is elected president we are likely to continue to screw up in just this way.

The consequences may be serious. For one thing if we are impelled to pay for our imports in something other than dollars it could cause a reduction in standards of living much more drastic than those being predicted for tariffs.

Democrats’ complaints about Trump being a fascist would probably be more effective if they hadn’t compared (nearly) every Republican presidential nominee since Dewey to Hitler.

I don’t think that this report at the Wall Street Journal by Kate King on how higher rents are pressing small retailers tells the whole story:

When the lease for Alex Macias’ furniture store in Mesa, Ariz., came up for renewal in 2021, his landlord asked for twice the current rent.

“In hindsight, they were saying, ‘Well, this is what a national tenant will pay. Can you pay that?’ ” Macias said.

Macias balked at the higher cost and closed the store. His landlord replaced it with Five Below, a national discount chain that has been expanding aggressively in recent years and agreed to the higher rent.

A lengthy stretch of scant new construction of retail real estate, combined with demand from expanding retailers, has reduced a longstanding property glut. Retail availability sits near record lows.

She concludes:

Phoenix has experienced some of the nation’s biggest rent increases this year. Prices there rose 7.4% in the second quarter compared with the same period in 2023, according to real-estate firm JLL.

Macias, the furniture-store owner, was able to solve his rising-rent problem by reopening in a building that he purchased.

His former landlord, Joshua Simon of SimonCRE, said the furniture store had been paying below-market rent.

For many of the city’s small businesses, developing a close relationship with the local landlord is crucial to survival. Sarah Bingham, co-owner of the vintage clothing store Antique Sugar in downtown Phoenix, said her landlord recently offered to buy her out of her lease so a restaurant he was an investor in could take her space.

I suspect that what she’s reporting is highly variable depending on location. I have no reason to doubt her findings about Phoenix.

But I could turn on my smartphone’s camera, start walking west, and pass dozens of empty storefronts, some of which have been empty since long before COVID. I’m not entirely sure why there’s so much available retail space here. Declining population, more people in this area shop online, high taxes, it could be all sorts of things.

It reminds me of the old wisecrack about farming that there’s either not enough rain or too much rain. How much retail space is enough? How do you know when you’re overbuilt on retail space? How about office space?

and do we want it to be?

George Friedman provides his definition of a superpower:

The idiosyncratic point I am trying to make is that great power depends on weapons, warriors, bravery and training, but it also depends on the power to persuade or induce, or even more generally, the ability to get things done. War is not waged with tanks; it is waged with the delivery of fuel to tanks. This is not an Earth-shattering statement, nor am I the first one to say it. But in constructing a model that forecasts the future of, say, the Chinese military, words matter.

We think of military power as the massive engine of war. There is truth in that. But the root of that power is the ability of a force to maintain itself at the essential operational level. Some nations have both. In China, power is determined largely by whether Beijing can sustain it for an extended course. China’s geography internally and along its boundaries indicates that a war waged on its territory could be long, complex and, above all, subtle. This is China’s history and its future. How it handles the subtle will determine whether it can be called a superpower.

And, even beyond “the delivery of fuel to tanks”, remaining a superpower is contingent on having the fuel to deliver to tanks and being able to deliver components to maintain our weapons systems in the field and the ability to produce those components. Today we do not have that ability. That has been the cost of our deindustrialization.

The bottom line is that we can’t remain a superpower unless we continue to produce our weapons of war and the fuel and components to maintain them domestically. The question I can’t answer is whether to remain a superpower. To whatever extent our own security depends on our remaining a superpower, I think the answer is “yes”. To the extent that it means our continuation of what I’ve called “the Batman theory of the U. S. role in the world”, I think the answer is “no”.

Before it disappears into the memory hole I wanted to comment on this editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about the record on inflation,taxation, and economic growth.

I agree with this:

Some of the $3 trillion in Covid spending during 2020 no doubt contributed to inflation, especially the $900 billion that December when the economy had nearly rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. That bill was a bipartisan mistake.

Said another way Donald Trump shares some of the blame for the inflation that ensued early in the Biden Administration. But we need to understand this:

Then in March 2021, Democrats stoked consumption even more with their $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, even as states were lifting lockdowns and vaccines rolled out.

The bill was largely composed of transfer payments, including $1,400 checks per person, $3,600 per child tax credits, an extra $300 a week in unemployment benefits, a 15% increase in food stamps, rental assistance and more. Such handouts discouraged unemployed Americans from returning to work since they could earn as much not working.

President Biden further loosened the spending spigot with executive actions, sweetening food stamps and waiving monthly student loan payments. A Congressional Budget Office report this week noted that the 2021 food-stamp boost likely reduced the labor supply since people received fewer benefits the more income they earned.

This unprecedented helicopter drop of money, aided by the Federal Reserve, kicked off the highest inflation in 40 years.

I think it’s actually arguable that the ensuing inflation was actually worse than it had been 40 years ago—how inflation is calculated has changed considerably since then.

This is a bone of contention:

Mr. Trump’s tariffs would be anti-growth, but by themselves they won’t cause inflation, which is an increase in the general price level. Tariffs increase relative prices in specific goods or industries. Mr. Trump’s first-term tariff blitz hurt economic growth but it didn’t lead to broad inflation.

I can’t actually adjudicate it. It sounds about right to me.

I agree with this, too:

Ms. Harris’s economists fret that Mr. Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies will create labor shortages that will drive up wages and prices. But even with Mr. Trump’s tougher border policies in his first term, the U.S. added 1.7 million immigrants, most of whom entered legally. His deportations didn’t make a dent in the labor force.

I challenge those who claim that the United States has a large and growing demand for unskilled or low-skilled workers to produce evidence of it.

I disagree with this:

As for Mr. Trump’s tax reform, it slightly reduced revenue as a share of GDP in 2018 and 2019. But it spurred business investment that boosted the supply-side of the economy and helped keep down inflation.

Let’s look at the record:

It looks pretty much like trend to me. There might have been an extremely small change in the curve relative to trend but it’s extremely small. I would speculate that any increase in investment was produced by the larger share of disposable income of the highest income earners unrelated to taxation than it was to changes in the marginal tax rates.

I also question this:

Today’s Keynesian economists underestimate the growth dividend, and overestimate the deficit impact, of tax cuts.

Don’t blame Keynesians or even neo-Keynesians. They understand how aggregate product limits the ability of deficit spending to produce economic growth. Blame “folk Keynesians” who believe that federal spending always stimulates the economy or modern monetary theorists who provided the theoretical foundation for them. Even the MMT-ers understand the role of aggregate product. Where they err is in thinking that fine-tuning is possible.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Joseph Epstein does a pretty fair job of airing some of my feelings about the present presidential election campaign:

I can’t vote for Kamala Harris. I find many of Donald Trump’s policies—his stand on closing the borders, his economic programs, his unflinching support for Israel—appealing but for one thing: the man who holds them. A friend of mine, also an independent voter, recently told me that on Election Day he thought he would probably hold his nose and vote for Mr. Trump. For others, even with noses held, the smell remains too strong to do likewise.

What, precisely, is wrong with Donald Trump? To start with the obvious, his vanity: his preposterously bleached and elaborately coiffed hairdo, his sprayed-on tan, the lengthy neckties to cover his avoirdupois. Add to this his propensity for insulting his political enemies. (He calls Gavin Newsom, governor of California, “Gavin Newscum.”) Then there’s his hyperbole, everywhere adding to his opponents’ misdeeds, building up his own achievements.

Still, why can’t I live with all this and vote for the man based on the general soundness of his policies? What I can’t live with, what I can’t vote for, is Mr. Trump’s relentless immodesty.

The balance of the piece is devoted to Mr. Epstein’s rejection of Mr. Trump’s “immodesty” which I think I would characterize as self-centeredness.

I’ve already expressed my disapproval of Donald Trump many times. Trump is Trump and beyond that he does not have the inclination or qualities of mind necessary to accomplish what he claims he will accomplish or adapt to changing circumstances. You can’t learn anything if you already know everything.

However, to my eye Kamala Harris is no better. I believe that Joe Biden is objectively the worst president of the post-war period (inflation, border control, sparse accomplishments of his key legislative victories, feckless foreign policy, etc.) and the Harris campaign is trying to straddle running on President Biden’s record with Vice President Harris’s airy goals while denying her commitment to the positions she staked out in her ill-fated presidential campaign in 2020. That she is a poor manager is a matter of record.

Can anyone make an affirmative argument to vote for Kamala Harris. Not a negative argument, e.g. that she’s not Trump or that she disagrees with the putative Republican view on abortion. An affirmative argument based on what she’s accomplished.

I’m skeptical that such an argument can be made but I’m open to persuasion. I think she’s running on identity and her theoretical good intentions.

BTW scolding is not persuasive.

That’s a clip from what I consider the best television series on politics and government ever made: Yes, Minister and its successor Yes, Prime Minister.

Is Ukraine trying to draw the U. S. into war with Russia? Is Israel trying to draw the U. S. into war with Iran?

This lament by writer Bartle Bull in the Wall Street Journal is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale:

I’ve been an outspoken Democrat since 1948, when I was the only student in my fifth-grade class to “vote” for Harry Truman. It’s been astonishingly difficult to disclose that next month I will vote for Donald Trump.

Like many, I will be doing so in the European way, voting for a party and its issues, rather than in the American way of supporting someone I like. When I have expressed my views—on economics, security and cultural matters—long-time liberal friends have said, “You sound like Trump, or some uneducated hillbilly.” Ignoring my schooling at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne, these friends sound like well-meaning dilettantes, otherwise described as self-righteous, useful idiots or bien-pensant.

and

For a long time, like an old locomotive, I have been building steam inside when liberal friends, with the certitude and arrogance of the righteous, decry me as a “right-winger.” In a Harvard class-reunion speech many years ago, I said that “Harvard should stand up to the tyrannies of the left today the way it stood up to the tyrannies of the right in the days of Joe McCarthy.” But the progressive agenda doesn’t seem to include what Truman and John F. Kennedy considered liberal values, such as true political tolerance.

Now, as a lifelong Democrat, I am voting Republican for policy reasons, not because I like Mr. Trump. I believe my old party, as it abuses the powers of office and threatens to pack the Supreme Court and end the filibuster, now supports a government that is far too strong at home and far too weak abroad.

I wonder how many lifelong Democrats the party can afford to alienate in promoting the agenda they’re hellbent on pursuing?