Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: From Trump Boom to Trump Gloom

The smart money thinks Trumponomics is a flop.

Last year, after an earlier stock market swoon brought on by headlines about the U.S.-China trade conflict, I laid out three rules for thinking about such events. First, the stock market is not the economy. Second, the stock market is not the economy. Third, the stock market is not the economy.

But maybe I should add a fourth rule: The bond market sorta kinda is the economy.

An old economists’ joke says that the stock market predicted nine of the last five recessions. Well, an “inverted yield curve” — when interest rates on short-term bonds are higher than on long-term bonds — predicted six of the last six recessions. And a plunge in long-term yields, which are now less than half what they were last fall, has inverted the yield curve once again, with the short-versus-long spread down to roughly where it was in early 2007, on the eve of a disastrous financial crisis and the worst recession since the 1930s.

Neither I nor anyone else is predicting a replay of the 2008 crisis. It’s not even clear whether we’re heading for recession. But the bond market is telling us that the smart money has become very gloomy about the economy’s prospects. Why? The Federal Reserve basically controls short-term rates, but not long-term rates; low long-term yields mean that investors expect a weak economy, which will force the Fed into repeated rate cuts.

So what accounts for this wave of gloom? Much though not all of it is a vote of no confidence in Donald Trump’s economic policies.

Eugene Robinson: If Trump retires to Mar-a-Lago, he better know how to swim

Someday, in the not-so-distant future, sea-level rise could claim Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps President Trump — by then no doubt disgraced, shunned and all but forgotten — would still be around to see his beloved Florida resort wiped out by a “Chinese hoax.”

Of all the wrongheaded policies Trump and his Republican Party insist on pursuing, their stubborn denial of climate change is the most baffling — and the most obviously self-destructive. Everything is personal with Trump. Can’t anybody get it through his head that his own coastal properties are urgently threatened? And that he is going out of his way to hasten their demise?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that July 2019 was the hottest month on planet Earth since record-keeping began in the 1880s. Wherever you live, think back to all the punishing heat waves you’ve experienced. Globally, July was worse.

Michelle Goldberg: With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos

Trump torched America’s foreign policy infrastructure. The results are becoming clear.

In a world spiraling towards chaos, we can begin to see the fruits of Donald Trump’s erratic, amoral and incompetent foreign policy, his systematic undermining of alliances and hollowing out of America’s diplomatic and national security architecture. Over the last two and a half years, Trump has been playing Jenga with the world order, pulling out once piece after another. For a while, things more or less held up. But now the whole structure is teetering.

To be sure, most of these crises have causes other than Trump. Even competent American administrations can’t dictate policy to other countries, particularly powerful ones like India and China. But in one flashpoint after another, the Trump administration has either failed to act appropriately, or acted in ways that have made things worse. “Almost everything they do is the wrong move,” said Susan Thornton, who until last year was the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, America’s top diplomat for Asia.

Consider Trump’s role in the Kashmir crisis. In July, during a White House visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump offered to mediate India and Pakistan’s long-running conflict over Kashmir, even suggesting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to do so. Modi’s government quickly denied this, and Trump’s words reportedly alarmed India, which has long resisted outside involvement in Kashmir. Two weeks later, India sent troops to lock Kashmir down, then stripped it of its autonomy.

Americans have grown used to ignoring Trump’s casual lies and verbal incontinence, but people in other countries have not.

Catherine Rampell: Trump has a dream team for mismanaging a recession

President Trump inherited a good economy, and for roughly 2½ years managed (mostly) not to mess it up. As with his business empire, he also somehow convinced much of the public that this windfall was due to his personal talents rather than luck.

But right now his luck — and ours — might be running out.

Bond markets are flashing warning signs. Stock prices are whipsawing. Some troubling economic data are rolling in, both here and abroad. All this suggests that the risk of a U.S. recession is rising.

Trump seems to be worried about getting blamed for what is coming. For months, he’s been setting up the Federal Reserve as a scapegoat — including for market swings caused by his own foolish trade wars. When stocks go up, Trump claims full credit; when they go down, it’s the Fed’s fault. Personal responsibility and all that.

My view on what he (and the rest of us) should be fixed on is slightly different. If indeed we have a downturn, Trump might or might not be the cause; the exact triggers of recession are often hard to pinpoint. But you know what would unequivocally be his fault, rather than fickle fortune?

A badly mismanaged recession. Which seems inevitable if indeed recession strikes.

Paul Waldman: Donald Trump is terrified, and he wants you to be, too

President Trump is gripped by fear.

That is the message coming through from his public statements, his recent policy decisions, and reporting from inside the White House that paints a picture of a president increasingly rattled and irrational, striking out wildly as he searches for an argument that will frighten Americans enough to reelect him.

Let’s take a tour around the news today:

• Trump told his fervid supporters at a rally Thursday that if he is not reelected, the economy will crash. “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)’s down the tubes. Everything is going to be down the tubes. So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.”
• Amid growing signs of a coming economic downturn, he is reportedly experiencing a combination of denial and rage. “Trump has a somewhat conspiratorial view, telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his reelection,” The Post reports. But he has also “told aides and allies that [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell] would be a scapegoat if the economy goes south.”
• Trump is increasingly using the powers of the presidency against his perceived enemies: “The president has grounded a military jet set for use by the Democratic House speaker, yanked a security clearance from a former CIA director critical of him, threatened to withhold disaster aid from states led by Democrats, pushed to reopen a criminal investigation targeting Hillary Clinton and publicly called for federal action to punish technology and media companies he views as biased against him.”
• When he learned that Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) were planning a visit to Israel, Trump pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bar them from the country — yes, a U.S. president pushing a foreign government to refuse entry to U.S. public officials. Netanyahu initially relented, then after near-universal international condemnation, announced that Tlaib would be allowed to visit her elderly grandmother on the West Bank.
• In the most bizarre bit of news, Trump reportedly has expressed interest in buying Greenland, a suggestion that should make us wonder whether he has gone completely off the deep end. His own staff seems to be wondering too: “The presidential request has bewildered aides, some of whom continue to believe it isn’t serious, but Trump has mentioned it for weeks.” Perhaps if they stall him for a while, he won’t order them to blow up the moon and build him a time machine.

In all this, it’s the economic news that really has Trump sweating. As any sensible observer understands, presidents get more credit than they deserve when the economy does well and more blame than they deserve when it does poorly, because most of what happens in a country with about 330 million people and more than $20 trillion of economic activity is out of their control.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Steve Rattner: How World Leaders Ruined the Global Economy

They took the best growth picture in a decade and put us in danger of recession.

Why are so many key global leaders pursuing so many stupid economic policies?

As recently as January 2018, the International Monetary Fund issued one of its most upbeat economic forecasts in recent years, extolling “broad based” growth, with “notable upside surprises.”

By last month, the fund had sliced its forecast for expansion this year to 3.2 percent — a significant falloff from the 3.9 percent projection reiterated just six months earlier — and had pronounced the economic picture “sluggish.” American investors are more concerned; the bond market is sounding its loudest recessionary alarm since April 2007.

The deterioration in the economic picture is not the consequence of irresponsible behavior by banks or a natural disaster or an unanticipated economic shock; it’s completely self-inflicted by major world leaders who have delivered almost universally poor economic stewardship.

The trade war initiated by President Trump sits firmly atop the list of bad policies. But Brexit has tipped Britain into economic contraction. With European governments unwilling to pursue structural reforms, the continent is barely growing. President Xi Jinping of China has focused on standing up to Mr. Trump and solidifying his own power. After a promising start reforming the economy, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has turned instead to oppressing his country’s Muslim minority.

And on and on.

Charles M. Blow: America Made Lady Liberty a Hypocrite

Invoking the poem at her base is the wrong response to Trump’s latest move to keep out nonwhite immigrants.

I’m really glad we’re having a discussion about what the Statue of Liberty means to America, even if it is precipitated by nefarious thinking. This week, the Trump administration moved forward with a change in legal immigration policy that will limit people allowed to enter the country to those who are well enough off not to need public assistance. It is called the “public charge” rule.

This is yet another way for the administration to restrict people coming from poorer countries, many of them countries with black and brown people. What we are witnessing is an all-out, every-avenue strategy to maintain America as a white majority country — and, by extension, to extend white power and white supremacy — for as long as possible.

This is the game. This has always been the game. This is why President Trump’s base loves him. He is fighting for their primacy, their privileges and their power. But media, politicians and liberals in general make a huge mistake when they respond by invoking the Statue of Liberty and the poem inscribed on the pedestal.

Harry Litman: Joaquin Castro struck a nerve. But publishing a list of Trump donors is constitutional.

Joaquin Castro has provided the Trump campaign and its high-end donors a lesson in the First Amendment, and they don’t like it.

Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio in the House of Representatives, tweeted that it was “sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” adding that “their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’ ”

Team Trump’s outrage was immediate. The Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, blasted Castro for “inviting harassment of these private citizens.” The Washington Examiner and other outlets condemned Castro’s “shaming” of Trump supporters. [..]

The argument that Castro has published a “target list” — “at worst, he’s encouraging violence,” wrote Murtaugh — is especially rich coming from a crowd led by a president one of whose only actual accomplishments is elevating the schoolyard threat into a feature of American presidential politics.

The larger irony is that the aggrieved howls of protest for violation of Americans’ free-speech rights have it exactly backward.

It is Castro’s publication of the list of maximum donors that is protected by the First Amendment, which in fact requires the high rollers to accept their outing as the price of free speech.

Steve Greehouse: American unions have been decimated. No wonder inequality is booming

Something urgent needs to be done to give America’s workers more say in our politics so that their voices are not dwarfed by billionaires

Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage in a decade, the longest stretch without such an increase since the federal minimum wage was first enacted in 1938. One state legislature after another has passed right-to-work laws to undermine unions. Donald Trump has taken numerous anti-worker actions: scrapping several worker safety rules, rolling back a regulation extending overtime pay to millions more workers, and killing a rule that required Wall Street firms to act in the best interests of workers when overseeing their 401(k) plans. Trump has even nominated as labor secretary a lawyer who has spent decades fighting on behalf of corporations to weaken worker protections.

In my new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, I explain that there is a little-understood, but profound reason why all these anti-worker actions are happening: America’s unions and workers have less power in policymaking and the workplace than they have in decades. Indeed, the percentage of workers in unions is at its lowest level in over a century – down to 10.5% from a peak of 35%. All this helps explain why wages have stagnated for decades, income inequality has soared and corporations and billionaire donors have undue sway over our politics, policymaking and political appointments.

In the 2015–16 election cycle, business outspent unions 16-to-1 –$3.4bn to $213m – according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Each year all of the nation’s unions spend about $48m on lobbying in Washington, while corporate America spends more than $2.5bn – more than 50 times as much. This has made many in Congress far more attentive to corporations than to workers, thus the rush to cut corporate taxes, but the failure to increase the minimum wage.

Amanda Marcotte: If “Blue Lives Matter,” how come conservatives won’t back gun control to save cops?

A shooter injured six cops in Philly, but the right still rejects gun control that could keep officers safer

In response to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement — which addresses police violence against civilians, among other things — angry conservatives retaliated by creating the pseudo-movement “Blue Lives Matter.” That phrase was meant to imply that people who want to reduce civilian killings by police are trying to get cops killed, and that conservatives are the only ones who are standing up for the boys in blue who keep our streets safe. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, has run with this line of argument, using it, as well as showy and insincere displays of patriotism, to attack black celebrities who speak out against racism.

It turns out, however, that when given a choice between protecting “blue lives” and defending ridiculously lax gun laws, conservatives will always choose the latter. That was amply demonstrated after Wednesday’s mass shooting in Philadelphia, in which six police officers were injured and two were held hostage during an hours-long standoff with a heavily armed man who was trying to evade arrest on drug charges.

“When will it stop, right?” presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as the standoff was ongoing. “Part of my focus on what we need to do around smart gun safety laws is we have to have more enforcement around gun dealers.”

Right-wing America responded, as it generally does, by immediately prioritizing guns over human lives — in this case, the lives of police officers.