This Is How Trump Will Smash the Machine of U.S. Economic Power

Economic security officials worked across administrations, gradually developing grand ambitions of a global order founded on financial sanctions, export controls and development of crucial technologies. Each new administration built up the economic weapons it inherited from the last and encouraged its successors to keep building the structures of American economic power. We are about to find out what happens when those structures are controlled by a disruptive administration — and what happens when that administration inherits the weapons without the accompanying sense of responsibility.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

Other Writing:

Essay

Google and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy

Using The Princess Bride to explain Google’s corporate policies: A blogpost that I wrote elsewhere, complaining about Google, has led to a disagreement between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. Drum Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that “don’t be evil” stuff? I mean, Google’s a big corporation. They’ve been a big public ...
Read Article
Essay

A More Imperfect Union: On the European Central Bank

How a central bank created to exist apart from politics got drawn into bitter political arguments. In September, the European Central Bank announced that it had taken decisions on a “number of technical features regarding the Eurosystem’s outright transactions in secondary sovereign bond markets.” The ECB did all it could to make these decisions sound ...
Read Article