Some Links
The Trump administration says this week it will impose reciprocal tariffs on countries that have regularly run substantial trade surpluses with the U.S. But these surpluses have enabled many of the countries to invest heavily in U.S. Treasury securities and U.S. corporate bonds, helping keep U.S. interest rates relatively low and bolstering America’s economic growth.
If countries respond to Mr. Trump’s tariffs by reducing their investments, it would decrease demand for U.S. debt securities and increase the interest rate that must be paid upon their issuance. This could slow the U.S. economy.
Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasurys have risen over the past decade, from $6.1 trillion in 2015 to $8.5 trillion in December 2024. At the end of 2024, such foreign holdings constituted about 30% of all U.S. Treasurys, representing a significant portion of total demand.
Some of the biggest foreign holders of U.S. Treasurys are countries that have consistently reported trade surpluses with the U.S. As of last December, based on Treasury Department data, Japan held $1.06 trillion in U.S. Treasurys, China $759 billion, Luxembourg $424 billion (on behalf of European investment funds) and Canada $379 billion.
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Myriad factors determine U.S. interest rates. Nevertheless, since target countries will want to respond to reciprocal tariffs, they may stop buying or even sell U.S. debt securities. Either response would increase U.S. interest rates and decrease economic growth. International trade flows and international investing are two sides of the same street.
Who will benefit from President Trump’s 25% auto tariffs? One man. Shawn Fain, the pugilistic United Auto Workers president, who stumped for Kamala Harris, has killed thousands of jobs with excessive collective-bargaining demands and is now aiding anti-Israel protesters on college campuses who are among his members.
“We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working-class communities for decades,” Mr. Fain said last week. But is he interested in working-class communities or merely promoting an anticapitalist agenda?
Asked in 2023 whether he worried about his union’s strike against Detroit’s Big Three hurting the economy and increasing car prices, he shrugged: “It’s not [that] we’ll wreck the economy. We’ll wreck their economy. The economy that only works for the billionaire class and not the working class.”
In his opinion, billionaires “don’t have a right to exist”—any more than Israel does according to the UAW graduate-student members protesting at Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, the University of California and other schools. The war against Hamas, Mr. Fain said last spring, “is wrong.” So too, he claims, is colleges’ punishment of protesters who break campus rules and harass Jewish students. What’s wrong is Mr. Fain’s exploiting auto workers to drive his leftist ideological crusade.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin busts the myth that the American midwest has been “deindustrialized.” Here’s his conclusion:
It is time for the president to stop looking backward, inwardly, and fearfully. The U.S. should be equipping itself for the future, engaging with the global economy, and confident in its success. It needs a policy approach to match that task.
An utterly baseless – economically, factually, and legally – move. The 232 autos investigation ended years ago, and the president chose then to not take action against imports (bc doing so would be ridiculous). To do it now just screams desperation.
Stuart Anderson, writing in Forbes, identifies yet another incoherent aspect of Trump’s trade ‘policy.’ Two slices:
Donald Trump wants to increase trade with Russia while imposing tariffs to reduce trade with other nations. Economists say Canada, Mexico and Europe offer many more business opportunities than Russia. They question whether Trump’s policy of imposing tariffs to reduce trade deficits with other countries is a sensible goal. Ironically, for years, the United States has run a large trade deficit with Russia, the country Trump wants to embrace the most.
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Experts say Russia’s business climate is unhospitable and even life-threatening for foreign businesspeople. American Michael Calvey invested in Russia for 25 years until a commercial dispute landed him in prison for two months, followed by two years of monitoring with an electronic device. “When he developed a cancerous tumor in one leg, the court refused to allow him to remove the device, so doctors operated without benefit of an M.R.I.,” reported the New York Times. He was convicted and given a suspended sentence. Calvey said he would no longer consider investing in Russia.
George Will reports that “government and universities battle in a contest of bad behavior.” A slice:
Regarding the University of Pennsylvania, the government has frozen $175 million in federal funding because the 2022 women’s swimming team included a biological male, in violation of a 2025 executive order supported by public opinion. But, per Whittington, the Penn athletic department’s misbegotten policy (reflecting the NCAA’s policy at the time but since changed) should not turn unrelated research into collateral damage from government policy.
There probably is scant public support for Columbia, Penn or universities generally. They are learning, painfully, that when you ask for trouble, you should expect trouble. Of higher education, it is fair to ask: Has so much prestige ever been squandered so quickly? Universities issuing solemn pronouncements about political events have appeared childishly self-absorbed. They seem unaware that few people take seriously what universities think because they think things like this: “Mispronouning” merits punishment, and advocating genocide against Jews deserves “contextualizing.”
Intellectuals, often the last to understand things, are discovering the obvious: When universities adopt stances that are adversarial and disdainful toward the (they say: systemically racist, social-justice-deprived) society that sustains them, the sustaining wanes.
The body of law that the court applied is laid out in the Goseibai Shikimoku, a compilation of norms and precedents drawn up in 1232. This text reveals a common law growing organically out of resolved cases. Those cases both generated and qualified precedents, which were then generalized to create a comprehensive and flexible law; the law so generated was qualified in turn by the principle of dōri — the samurai community’s sense of natural justice. The law’s main concerns were to restrain and regulate the authority of the Bakufu and its agents, to limit samurai violence, to ensure orderly inheritance and property transfer, and to prevent litigant abuse by affirming procedure.
Leeson argues that the system was effective, impartial, and predictable. Its effectiveness is revealed by the fact that it passed a market test: It did not lose clients or cases to other systems. Its impartiality can be seen in the surviving evidence of how cases were handled. And its predictability is demonstrated by the increasing frequency of out-of-court settlements—a phenomenon that emerged not because of vexatious costs but because outcomes were often predictable from precedent, making it sensible to arrive at a settlement with no further action. (Such private agreements still had to be ratified by the court to be enforceable.)
All this was a remarkable achievement.
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