While politics is a game and a pretty tough one in the US, it's an
incredibly dangerous sport also.
And to play with the facts and the lies that we're saying about China
right now has consequences.
And that's what I worry about.
And it's said by people like Trump who have no sense of
responsibility at all, and it can get our country and the world into
a lot of trouble.
Well, let's see. He'll leave us with a pandemic killing perhaps
hundreds of thousands of Americans, he'll leave us with Great
Depression conditions, he'll leave us with a public debt that has
gone completely out of control.
He'll leave us with the highest levels of the inequality of income
and wealth in our history.
He'll leave us with the most polarized society in our history.
I think it is, aside from perhaps James Buchanan's lead into the
civil war, the worst presidency in American history.
One thing that Trump has done is that he broke the Washington
obsession with budget deficits and he did it for all the wrong
reasons. But it has been a positive.
And so that is actually. Yeah, that has contributed.
If, you know, if we'd had President Clinton, you know, that it would
have been fiscal austerity year after year because Republicans would
have been jumping up and down about the debt and that would have been
a bad thing for the economy.
I think if if nothing else, Joe Biden and the people around him are
not going to allow themselves to be bullied into panicking about the
debt, the way that to some extent Barack Obama was.
So that's going to be a positive thing if we have a Biden presidency.
President Trump has been very suspicious of our relationships with the
rest of the world through international trade and immigration and
foreign investment. But after this crisis, I think it's going to be
very difficult for policymakers to reengage with the rest of the
world. And by the way, the rest of the world is going to a hard time
reengaging with us. So our economy will be less globalized to all our
detriment. Our economy will be diminished by that.
So a lot depends on what the next stage of the policy response is.
If we don't get specific policies that we can talk about, it will be
a long and rather flattish recovery.
And we have to understand that we're going to come from levels that
will still be eye-popping, notwithstanding really horrible numbers
we've seen so far. So we are going to be in a very deep hole.
And unless we get policy accelerators, it will take us quite a long
time to get out of it. So unless the US is certainly going to start
saving a lot more, it will need capital from overseas, which means
it's going to import more than exports.
And yes, they can stop importing from China, but unless the savings
rate goes up, it will simply mean that they end up importing from a
lot of other places.
And it's great rhetoric, of course, or certainly worse in 2016 to say
that you're going to bring all this stuff back to the heartland of
America, but without a defined policy to deliberately raise domestic
savings, it isn't going to work.
As we bring jobs back or not, it's probably not going to be when I say
we're going to be Supply-Chain back, but it won't be jobs.
Much of that work will be done by robots.
And so we shouldn't think of this as a jobs program.
It's a resilience program.
And in fact, in many aspects of this kind of protectionism are going
to backfire. If others reciprocate, our exports will go down.
One of the particularly ugly aspects of what the administration did
was to say we aren't going to allow exports of some medical supplies.
We import so many, much more medical supplies than we export.
So if we if others reciprocate with that same kind of ugliness, that
same kind of putting ourselves in front of everybody else without any
sense of oh, of the fact that we're in this together, we are going to
be in a really bad shape.
So let's hope that others are not as nasty as we have been and that
others understand more than the Trump administration has understood,
that we really need to have a co-operative solution to this pandemic.