Rethink Economic Balance

Economic Nationalism is an important issue for the health of the country. Like Smoot Hawley in the 1930’s, which contributed to the depression, it is an ill-fated attempt to solve an economic growth problem with an unworkable solution. Trump’s tariffs and Johnson’s Brexit are front running examples.

Current leading election issues like Climate Change, healthcare, and higher education will need to be structured to provide economic growth. At the same time Economic Nationalism needs to be refuted and destroyed for its negative long term economic consequences.

The Federal Reserve is another area that needs to be taken under review. It’s interest rate actions have created a large imbalance between savers and investors. In the current environment cheap money has led to wholesale market speculation rather than building out a low carbon energy infrastructure. (See the Fixing Inequality section in the Digging Deeper section of this site) While everyone likes a rising stock market, speculation leads to markets that are vastly overvalued at times versus the fundamentals and leads to huge doses of volatility. For regular investors, volatility creates severe hazards in the periodic market crashes, like in 2000, 2008, where various speculative interests got in trouble.