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On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by almost 800 points and shares of tech giants fared even worse. It was a reversal from the market's gains Monday, when Wall Street celebrated news of a truce in the U.S.-China trade fight. I discussed on the CBS Evening News with Jeff Glor.
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If you’re a regular listener, you know this show is not political in nature. We leave that stuff to the so-called experts.
But since next Tuesday is Election Day, we thought we’d talk a little politics with rockstar author and repeat guest, Michael Lewis.
A prolific writer, it’s highly likely that you’ve probably picked up at least one of his books, including Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short or Flash Boys.
In this interview, we discuss his latest work, The Fifth Risk, which focuses on the consequences we may face if some of the people given control over the government have no idea how it works.
As you turn the pages, you’ll be taken into various departments of the government that at times resemble a rudderless ship.
In Agriculture, the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.
Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for people who wish to shrink the world to a worldview.
Thankfully, Michael Lewis also finds the heroes, those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running.
“Better Off” is sponsored by Betterment.
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After the Trump Administration announced that it would impose 10 percent tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, starting Monday September 24 – and then the Chinese said they would retaliate with 5-10 percent tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods, the stock market rallied…and then kept on going up, throughout the week. The proximate rationale for the bump was that tariff levels were lower than expected and on the U.S. side, excluded a number of consumer-friendly goods, like iPhones, smart watches and sneakers.
So far, tariffs and trade conflicts have not negatively impacted the labor market. The economy added a solid 201,000 jobs in August and with revisions to the previous two months (down 50K), employers have added an average 207,000 a month to payrolls this year, quite a feat, considering that we are in the tenth year of the expansion.
While many were kicking back during the last unofficial week of the summer, one of the most interesting bits of news that fell below the radar was the resignation announcement from Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It may seem a little inside baseball, but as reported in the New York Times, Frotman said in his resignation letter that "millions of borrowers had been harmed" by ‘sweeping changes’ at the bureau under Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director, who became the bureau’s acting director in November.
Efforts to overhaul the NAFTA free trade agreement are entering a critical new phase. President Trump and his outgoing Mexican counterpart announced a preliminary deal to replace the trade agreement for three North American countries. Stocks hit record highs, even though Mr. Trump threatened to place tariffs on Canadian-made cars if Canada does not reach a deal. I joined CBS This Morning to break down the deal and discuss the possible impact.
The economy was on fire in the second quarter. According to the government, real annualized Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) was 4.1 percent, the strongest quarter since Q3 2014, which came in at a sizzling 4.9 percent annual rate. As a reminder, GDP measures the nation’s total output of goods and services and is released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on a quarterly basis, with two subsequent monthly revisions to the advance estimate.
The government released its gross domestic product report for the second quarter. It showed the U.S. economy grew 4.1 percent from April through June. That's the best showing since 2014. I joined CBS This Morning to discuss the report.
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President Trump is not happy with the Federal Reserve. In an interview with CNBC, he said that while he put a “very good man” at the helm of the central bank (Jerome Powell), he’s “not thrilled” that interest rates are rising. The remarks got a lot of attention, because for the past twenty years or so, presidents and administration officials have abstained from commenting on the Fed’s monetary policy to preserve the central bank’s independence from partisan pressure.(For more on the complicated relationship between the Fed and Congress, check out my interview with author and Fed expert, Mark Spindel.)
