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4 days ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
WARNING: This blog post contains major spoilers for many episodes of the TV show Black Mirror. I’ve been blogging pretty nonstop about economics, and my last post got pretty bleak. I feel like I deserve a break. What better way to distract myself from my country slowly morphing into a real-life dystopia than to watch TV shows about fantasy dystopias? I’ve been a fan of Black Mirror since the show first came out 14 years ago.
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5 days ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
After Trump was elected, I wrote a post outlining what I thought was the best-case scenario for his second term. I made it clear that I didn’t think this scenario was very likely, but it was at least plausible. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out that way. In fact, in some ways, Trump 2.0 has proven to be not only worse than his first term in office, but worse than almost anyone expected during his campaign.
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1 week ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
Witnessing America’s flamboyantly stupid economic self-harm and its slow descent into authoritarianism has made some people ask whether the 21st century will end up being the Chinese Century. Thomas Friedman says yes: “There was a time when people came to America to see the future,” [an American businessman in China] said.
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1 week ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
Even as tariffs begin to send the U.S. economy down the tubes, the Trump administration is doing some other things that are not as flamboyantly stupid, but which could have even longer-reaching and darker consequences. The other day, the Trump administration arrested an innocent Salvadoran man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia and sent him to a prison in El Salvador with no trial or even any accusation of a crime.
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1 week ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
Trump’s current trade strategy will diminish American power and American technological capability, divide the U.S. from allies and partners, and give China an opening to become the world’s preeminent nation.
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1 week ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
Today’s post is about something that’s nerdy and technical, but also incredibly dangerous and terrifying. Usually, Americans can get by perfectly well without ever thinking about the intricacies of international finance and the bond market. But these things actually have the power to devastate America’s economy like nothing else. Our fabled prosperity is like a town built on the back of a giant sleeping dragon, and the dragon’s name is “international finance and the bond market”.
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1 week ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, both in the policy world and with my own schedule — in Japan I was often doing 4 meetings, events, or interviews a day to promote my book, leaving me a bit less time to write. And then there was the madness of Trump’s tariffs, that crowded out pretty much everything else for a while. But I’m back from Japan, and tariff madness has calmed down a bit, and there are a lot of things I need to catch up on! I’m also jet-lagged, so I’m writing pretty late at night.
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2 weeks ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
Well, after a stock market crash, a bond market crash, and a blizzard of recession predictions, Donald Trump has paused some of his massive “Liberation Day” tariffs. But the reprieve is only partial and temporary. The very high tariff on China is still in place (and in fact has been increased). The 10% tariffs on all imports are still in effect.
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2 weeks ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
The U.S. stock market continues to crash, as investors realize that Trump’s insanely high tariffs are not going to be quickly walked back: U.S. stock futures dropped on Sunday evening as the White House remained defiant even after a two-day historic stock market rout that followed President Donald Trump’s rollout of shockingly high tariff rates on most key U.S. trading partners…Dow Jones Industrial average futures fell 1,531 points, or 4% Sunday evening, pointing to another brutal session...
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2 weeks ago | 
noahpinion.blog | Noah Smith
I don’t actually think you can defeat Trump’s tariffs by arguing with them rationally, or by explaining economic theory. I mean, how do you argue with something like this? I’ve resigned myself to the idea that the only way America is going to come to the broad realization that broad-based tariffs are bad is to experience the negative consequences first-hand — i.e., to touch the proverbial hot stove.