PLEASE NOTE, WE WILL NOT PUBLISH NEXT WEEK AS WE WILL BE OFF FOR SPRING BREAK WITH OUR FAMILY.  WE WILL RESUME OUR NORMAL PUBLISHING SCHEDULE THE FOLLOWING WEEK

Before he came into office, Bessent had repeatedly criticized then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for boosting the share of bills, which mature in up to a year, in US debt — something he argued held down longer-term yields and was done to boost the economy before the election. Yet Bessent retained the Yellen team’s plan for debt issuance earlier this month.     -Bloomberg, 2/20/25 Asked about his past comments, Bessent said Thursday that “the previous administration shortened some of the duration,

At a global level, there is just one really big surplus (China) – and one really big deficit (the US).  That in a sense makes global adjustment easy.    -Brad Setser, Council on Foreign Relations, via X, 2/5/25 When paired with Setser’s chart on the prior page, the inference is that China has recycled a substantial portion of its world-leading surpluses into US equities, and specifically, the Nasdaq 100.  i.e., the Nasdaq 100 is the biggest

In strategic terms, nations ended up being dependent or independent according to their ability to make things for themselves. Why were Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians subservient to England and France in the nineteenth century? Because they could not make the machines and weapons Europeans could.      -James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1993 In 1991 the economic historian William Lazonick published an intriguing book, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy. It examined