Did you believe Trump would not enter wars in Mideast?

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June 26, 2025 — Many people believed candidate Trump when he swore to avoid military entanglement.   In my January blog post,  at inauguration time, I wrote these two sentences, as a supposed lookback from the end of Trump’s 1st year:

“Pundits were soon chastising each other for having taken Trump’s isolationist foreign policy to imply a renunciation of military intervention abroad.  They suddenly remembered George W. Bush’s reversal, early in his presidency, of the very high bar that candidate Bush had set for military interventions, when rejecting nation-building in October 2000.” read more

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Foreign aid looks good, now that it’s gone

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May 24, 2025 — Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”   She was lamenting loss of the environment.  Aid to developing countries (Overseas Development Assistance) may now be in the same category.

  1. How much does the US spend?

For the last 80 years, Americans have spent more on humanitarian assistance, economic development programs, and other foreign aid than any other country: $72 billion by the US government in 2024, and more by private NGOs. read more

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How to forecast a recession

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April 24, 2025 — Everyone wants to know if a recession is imminent.  But the most popular recession indicators are not necessarily the best places to look for the answer.

The question is front and center in the US now because of concerns over actions by the Trump Administration.  Six factors currently might trigger a downturn:

  • the trade war,
  • crash in the US stock market,
  • chaotic cuts in USG spending,
  • a US fiscal crisis arising from government shutdown, debt limit stand-off, or credit downgrading,
  • the blocking of net immigration, and
  • increased uncertainty and risk (driven especially by the erratic rollout of US tariff policy), as reflected in sharp increases in the VIX and  bond premia.
  1. Leading indicators

How can we tell if a recession is near?  Consider as an analogy a sailing ship navigating through heavy fog, watching out for land, fearing to founder.  If the lookout sights certain birds, it is more likely that land is near. Analogously, some leading indicators may signal a heightened probability of recession. But only a probability; nothing is certain. read more

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