President Trump’s Feuding Advisors Need a New Focus: Economic Growth

In my most recent column in Forbes.com, I said the infighting in the West Wing was an inevitable outcome of the long economic stagnation that President Trump inherited. The solution does not reside in the President’s firing, demoting, or reorganizing his team or in having the feuding team members “work this out.” It lies in President Trump’s focusing his advisors on getting the economy moving again, creating jobs at a great rate, restoring upward income mobility for workers and generating a climate of equitable prosperity. JFK, Reagan, and Clinton all pushed economic growth to, toward, or even beyond the 4 percent

Greenspan’s Big Reveal: The Secret Recipe for Economic Growth

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan praises the gold standard in the February 2017 issue of The World Gold Council’s Gold Investor. Therein he makes what may be his strongest statements to date in praise of the gold standard. Here are some of the highlights. Toward the end of this interview he offers a Big Reveal: I view gold as the primary global currency. Gold, along with silver, is one of the only currencies that has an intrinsic value. It has always been that way. No one questions its value, and it has always been a valuable commodity, first coined in

Huffington Post Predicts Trump Will Call for Gold Standard

Recently, two of The Huffington Post’s political reporters, Eliot Nelson and Jeffrey Young (who have managed to fuse ridicule and journalism into something functionally indistinguishable from “Alternative Facts”) recently made a telling observation. Their characteristic facetiousness may obscure a brilliant intuition. They observed: “we give it a month until Trump calls for the gold standard to be reinstated because he likes the sound of it.” As I have previously written, gold has a profound appeal for Donald Trump: Bloomberg View‘s Timothy L. O’Brien recently provided a colorful and insightful feature entitled “Donald Trump Loves Gold and Don’t You Forget It.” Therein

Paul Krugman: “The Trump Economic Team Is Shaping up as a Gathering of Gold Bugs”

Paul Krugman tweets: Are people noticing that the Trump economic team is shaping up as a gathering of gold bugs? 1/ — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 20, 2016 That tweet is part of a recent series by Prof. Krugman divining glints of gold in the company of Donald Trump. He predominantly focuses on one of Trump’s appointments, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) for Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Krugman astutely points out that Mulvaney once observed that the Federal Reserve has “effective devalued the dollar” — hard to argue with when the dollar has lost 85 percent of its buying power

Trump White House Strategist Steve Bannon, Judeo-Christian Champion: “This Is a Revolution”

The progressive elites and the mainstream media expended massive black ink, hot air, and billions of scarce pixels defaming Trump campaign CEO, now White House strategist, Steve Bannon. A fascinating presentation to a 2014 Vatican gathering puts Bannon in an entirely different light. Bannon’s presentation recently was transcribed and published by BuzzFeed (and recently, also, noted in passing and quoted in part by The Washington Post). Bannon’s own words show him to be an eloquent and learned humanitarian with deep compassion for working people. His virulent detractors owe their readers a correction and Bannon an apology. BuzzFeed: [Bannon’s] remarks — beamed into

The Real Steve Bannon Revealed!

A marvelous interview with Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon has suddenly appeared in, no less, The Hollywood Reporter: “Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement” (Exclusive).” It is a perfect antidote to the McCarthyite insults being heaped on Bannon by the elitist left and its handmaiden, the mainstream media. Bannon is a provocateur. No sin in that; the left has a plethora of provocateurs. By every account he is an open-minded, generous (albeit demanding) soul. The media’s efforts to smear him are the most shameful application of “Tailgunner Joe,”

High Stakes for 2016: Judy Shelton for Fed Chair to Make America Great Again

In The Daily Caller, freelance writer Johannes Schmidt writes “On November 8th I’m Voting For Our Next Fed Chair.” It’s an especially astute column. While many commentators correctly have focused on the effect of the election outcome on appointments to the Supreme Court, too few have focused on the next president’s appointments to the Fed. This also is of capital importance. Schmidt writes: The policies implemented by the Fed are especially important (albeit often insidious) because money is our society’s most basic medium of exchange. The manipulation of its value affects every day citizens both in the short and long

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Good Monetary Policy Is Too Serious a Matter to Be Left to the Fed

US News and World Report‘s Andrew Soergel reports that “With White House in Sight, Trump, Clinton Plan Fed Renovations: No matter who wins the election, times are likely changing at America’s central bank.” “The Fed” really is a synecdoche for monetary policy. Monetary policy used to be, off and on, a significant factor of presidential campaigns. In this election cycle, the monetary policy issue has only arisen occasionally and has not become a major issue of contention. Pity. It really deserves to be front and center. What is widely regarded as the most striking speech in presidential campaign history was

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