tariffs

The Financial Times and the Nikkei News are what I regard as the most reliable sources of financial news. The NIkkei is arguably less useful because it focuses on Japan and on other Asian markets where only the (my view) brave/foolish/uninformed participate. The FT view on Trump’s economic plans:

“Trump’s tariffs are. in sum, a grotesque idea: they will help the less competitive sectors of the economy, while harming the more competitive parts; they will damage many of his own supporters; and they will inflict grave harm on international trade, the world economy and international relations. Yes, there is a case for targeted industrial interventions. But Trump’s tariffs are precisely the opposite of this.”

You’d think Trump would have learned something from the fiasco of his soybean tariffs, but no.

intentional cruelty

I’ve spent much of the past seven years documenting the town of Hazleton, PA. It’s story is, I think, very similar to that of Springfield, Ohio. Hazleton lies on top of a mountain of coal. That made it wealthy during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Textiles replaced coal after flooding in 1951 delivered a coup de grace to the underground mines–until that industry moved into the South and from there abroad.

Today, Hazleton is enjoying renewed prosperity as the home of massive warehouse complexes, many serving e-commerce, that are an integral part of the supply chain serving the Northeast. A wave of new residents, many of them from the Dominican Republic, by way of Patterson, NJ and NYC, provide much of the staffing. They’ve also reinvigorated the downtown and the local housing market.

Not content to enjoy the budding renaissance, however, then mayor, Republican Lou Barletta, and the town council passed a number of highly discriminatory ordnances intended to discourage Dominican immigrants from settling there. The ACLU contested the new laws, winning at every level until the Supreme Court declined to consider the town fathers’ appeal to it. Legal fees punched a big hole in town finances.

The Springfield situation appears to have much more benign …until Trump and Vance promulgated the highly improbable story that they had to know as false that Haitians were stealing and eating both local pets and waterfowl from the local park. But that was enough to trigger bomb threats and hate speech from the duos followers. Seems like intentional cruelty to me. In Trump’s case, it may mostly be his cognitive deterioration, but in the case of Vance, he’s also attacking the constituents he’s representing in the senate.