US-China Trade: Three Sides to Every Story

17 April 2018 As with any disputed relationship, there are three sides to every story: my version, their version, and the truth.  So it is with the deepening Sino-American bilateral trade conflict.  In order to reach a workable resolution to the current dispute (which I fully expect), policymakers on both sides need to consider the [...]

State Of the Union: Jam Today, Cuts Tomorrow

23 January 2018 On 30 January, President Trump will deliver his first State of the Union speech.  To be sure, the state of the US economy is healthy  (I will leave it to others to assess the state of the Union). Indeed, GDP has  advanced at over a 3% clip during the past nine months.  [...]

US Tax Reform: Panacea or a Risk too Far?

2 December 2017 In a swanky Washington restaurant in 1974, economist Arthur Laffer presented Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (future VP and US Secretary of Defence) a doodle on the back of a napkin.  What appeared was a diagram of the now infamous “Laffer Curve”.  The graph depicts the relationship between tax rates and tax [...]