With European markets closed across the continent on Monday as the Easter holiday continues, overnight Asia was busy with the Shanghai Composite letting off some steam, and closing down 0.7% at session lows on concerns the Shanghai and Shenzhen home bubble have been popped prematurely by the politburo.
Leon Hadar does a good job making some sense out of Trump’s recent rambling interviews on foreign policy with The New York Times and Washington Post:
We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.
On Thursday, March 24, the 40th anniversary of the last Argentine coup d’état, a large crowd filled Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with shouts of “nunca más,” “never again.” They were referring to the U.S.-supported Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983 and the repression that characterized it: the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opposition on a mass scale. “Never again,” then, to such oppression, and “never again” to the overthrow of democracy—the last coup was the sixth in Argentina’s brief history. But President Obama’s visit to Argentina, the first such U.S.
We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
An address delivered to the Libertarian Party of Florida on March 23, 2016 in Destin, Florida