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The US Federal's half percentage point interest rate cut bodes well for stocks and bonds in the US, says this report in WSJ, as it reduces the burden of interest rates on small business that has a part of its debt in floating rates. The default risk component of rates also shrinks for large and small companies. A lot depends on how much the US is investing in manufacturing, in chips and science, in education, in infrastructure that reduces the costs to business and in its industries, which is the ultimate driver of growth. In this sense the Biden administration and Jerome Powell's Fed have accomplished a remarkable deal in the difficult period of the pandemic's four years 2020-2024. Much remains to be done yet this is a big deal, and the next president can leverage these strengths to set the US on the right path, the Way Forward for America.

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A new central bank governor Hafize Erkan, increases interest rates from 8.5% to 16% in June 2023 to tackle inflation of about 40%.

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The US death rates were 15% above normal compared to other European countries at 9-12% above normal for the pandemic. The US deaths exceed 1 million in 2020 and 2021. India's death rate was about 26% above normal, Brazil's 24% above normal compared to 41% for Mexico, even though Brazil made the most headlines. Uneven vaccination in states in the northern and southern US led to the high US death rate and 1 million deaths.

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The European central bank increases interest rates by quarter percentage point taking the deposit rate to 3.5%. The US Fed held off on increases. The US Fed started early with its increase in interest rates and maintained a steady posture with 8 interest rate increases over 2022-2023 in a period of just over 12 months. It has strengthened the dollar against the euro. The slow response of the ECB and price gouging in Europe has worsened the inflation picture there. The US Fed's policy combined with consumers resisting price gouging by halting purchases from stores, untangling of supply chains, the Biden administration's series of actions to tackle the cost of living increases, and overall investment in the economy that keeps employment resilient including government investment for the first time, is creating a better economy for America than most of the last two decades. 

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As the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, pushes up interest rates in a period of high inflation its goal is to raise rates to "neutral" a rate which neither spurs growth or slows it, says this report in the WSJ. Only problem is that no one really knows what that interest rate is. The Fed is expected to raise interest rates by half a percentage point at its meeting in May. And raise interest rates by another half point in June. Fed chairman Jerome Powell says of the policy "we are going to be raising rates and getting expeditiously to levels that are more neutral."

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WSJ offers ideas on retirement investing when faced with very low interest rates as in U.S. and Europe.

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At this point in May (May 22, 2026) a glimmer of hope appears for settling both the crisis in Hormuz and the Ukraine war. Pakistan, Turkey and China following DJT visit to China may be pushing Iran to lower the scale of the conflict. China's first priority was to be accepted by the US at the Beijing meeting as an equal power with the US, and keen to show its willingness to bear responsibility for peaceful resolution in conflict zones as a sign of its maturity as a world power. Much of this is not shown in the media as it is mostly done behind the scenes in communications that the media knows nothing about. Note that even in the depths of the Cold War during the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and Soviet action in Budapest, the US and the Soviets when their economies were not intertwined as the US and China are today, were still talking to each other to limit the conflicts to low level conflict. Hong Kong takeover, China's actions near Taiwan, China's presence in Latin America, Chinese cooperation with Iran, and Russia on Ukraine, China's economic competition in rare earths, are relatively smaller levels of friction considering 1950's Soviet's and the US. At the same time China and the Us are aware of a new bloc emerging in Oslo in May, where India is merging its economy with the Nordic economies of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and of the European Union and Germany, creating a new bloc of 2 billion people that can only grow rapidly with India's potential to exceed growth rates of 20% in the 600 million Eastern region for a decade. EU would make the shift to strategic partnership with India displacing the vital role the European Union has played in China's growth and economy. This would create new pressures for Russian president Putin to decide it is time to listen to a friend India and de-escalate lower the level of conflict with an initial peace deal that would lead to more talks on a final settlement. Because Russia would have a harder time tackling both India and Germany at the same time. NYT shows on the same day May 22 a report on Russia and a report by the Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Sonegard that say the elites in Russia and Putin were by January 2026 having very serious discussion to change the administration, bring Igor Sechin as negotiaor to end the Ukraine conflict before serious, possibly irreversible damage, to the Russian economy. Sweden's Sonegard says that between 2020 and 2024 Russian economy declined by 8%, not grew by 13% as official figures show, inflation is much higher than 5% as official figures show, and credit is tightening, bankruptcies expected, growth even with oil prices up down to 0.4% for 2026. During 20 years running Russia Putin's No. 1 priority, his life's mission was to restore, then exceed by a large margin the living standards of the Russian people. Having at such great cost accomplished the goal of gaining recognition as a Northern Power in Europe, having gained much of Russian speaking eastern Ukraine, Putin could wisely with self respect wind down Ukraine conflict for good. The US gains something similar to Northern Power status for Russia in its recommitment to the Monroe Doctrine, with Russia withdrawing from any involvement- and China tacitly doing the same-  in the western hemisphere. With that the US can tackle its own losses that match Russian losses in lives- loss of more American lives than in the Korean and Vietnam and WWI combined to drug smuggling from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and restoring rule of law in Cuba, Venezuela, and through drug cartel free Mexico good governance in Mexico.  ...

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According to a senior defense industry official Defense Secretary Robert Gates worries that counterinsurgency may not work in Afghanistan. According to the official even 40,000 troops would not give enough troop on the ground to protect the Afghns if the north and west continue to deteriorate. Gates is concerned about sending large amounts of additional US troops to Afghnistan. This is acountry with people very sensitive to occupying powers. A veteran of the soviet intervention there says they have an allergy to foreigners and attributes the soviet defeat to this. See the links in Intelilinks He is aware of the the dangers of this, if the expanded military footprint is seen as that of an occupying power especially when the government in Kabul is hugely unpopular, then this would galvanize new armed opposition to the US and draw US forces and NATO forces into aguerilla war of the type the soviet union faced there. It may do much worse if it galvanizes opposition in side Pakistan. The question Obama is focussing on is whether there is athreat to the US homeland security if other options than expanding troop strength are explored....

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The U.S. central bank, Federal Reserve, is grappling with the problem of low inflation. Inflation reached around 2% by December 2018 but has slowed to 1.5% in the second quarter of 2019. The cuts in interest rates to keep the U.S. and European stock markets from declining sharply and affecting business confidence and investment were part of the response from central banks following the blunders by banks in the years preceding 2008. This has hurt savers and savings accounts of ordinary Americans over a decade with rates as low as below 1%, creating a sense of inequity/fairness. Now the Federal Reserve is back to reducing rates by a quarter point from its current level of between 2.25 and 2.5%. Rates rose for a while as confidence returned to markets to the current level. The reason for reversing the increases and a cut in rates is that the U.S. central bank sees the need to set rates looking at the rates in Europe and other countries where the economic conditions and confidence is lacking and rates are kept lower than in the U.S. The Federal Reserve sees it as unhealthy to let the gap between the U.S. and rates in Japan and Europe to grow too large because of the global interlinkages. Earlier models of the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation are also seen as unreliable in today's conditions of irresponsible behaviour in banking and other sectors, and unfair trade advantages gained by nations in Asia that are now leading to trade wars. ...

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In this thoughtful essay Bob Davis of the WSJ asks whether the decision of the Clinton administration to admit China into the World Trade Organization was a bad one for the U.S.  Mr. Clinton in 2000 tried to persuade Congress citing words of president Woodrow Wilson that of a dream "of a world full of free markets, free elections, and free peoples working together."  Every year China would have its most favored nation status renewed with help from supporters in Congress. After WTO entry this was not necessary. Chinese leaders saw the entry into WTO as a way to knock down trade barriers, to act a wrecking ball for the planned economy, to give the economy a big boost.  In 1994 China was a relatively backward economy with 60% of the population living on less than $1.90 a day. Hard to imagine today.  Not everyone was convinced that it was good for the U.S. This included a trade attorney who had tackled a huge trade deficit with Japan in the Reagan period- Robert Lighthizer. Lighthizer was Deputy Trade Representative negotiating with the Japanese. His prediction was that no job in America would be safe once China entered the WTO, that China would become a dominant trading nation.  Robert Cassidy, 73, trade negotiator for president Clinton looks back on that time and says that he regrets what has happened, that all his work night and a day only benefited business and hurt workers. David Autor, MIT economist and his colleagues,  in a later study documented loss of 2.4 million jobs to Chinese competition between 1999 and 2011, in many manufacturing towns dotting the landscape of America, particularly in the midwestern states. And the expectation that the higher economic growth would lead to less political control did not turn out to be true.  In the process multinationals rushed to China after WTO entry and China became the world's manufacturing floor. By 2013 China's per capita income reached $7000, after years of fast GDP growth approaching 10% a year.  About 400 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty from living on less than $1.90 per day from 1999 to 2011, according to the World Bank. A big problem was that the U.S. did not plan for the change from WTO entry. No resources were allocated for the plan to let American workers adjust through worker retraining and special trade handicapped income support, to allow for a slow planned shift. Instead the pace of growth was faster than that which the U.S. faced with the Japanese export offensive in the eighties. China experienced double digit growth after 2000. The irony is that the Republican administrations that followed Clinton followed a policy of free trade to the advantage of China's state run economy when working class Americans voted mostly for the Democratic Party. Little was done and little said in the media from Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the establishment during this time even after Mr. David Autor documented the effects of trade in the U.S.  Till Mr. Trump recognizing the alienation in communities hit by job losses from trade upended American politics, shifted this part of the electorate to the Republican base. Mr. Lighthizer's view is that complaints about China should be left out of WTO because it is naive to tackle it that way. With a $375 billion China trade deficit for 2017 the challenge has to be met in a different way, and the U.S. has to rely on regaining its economic strength within a fair trading framework. Having negotiated with the Japanese Mr. Lighthizer sees the approach adopted then as the one right for today. During the long negotiations Lighthizer is said to have received many negotiating positions of the Japanese signifying no change in long sessions. He once simply made a paper plane and sent it right back, in one of these sessions. He meant that the U.S. was serious about reversing the imbalance in trade. ...

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Strong economic performance means that the US Fed's Powell is "not in a hurry" to raise rates. Powell said "The economy is strong. We see very strong growth." Powell also said about the Fed- "Integrity is everything."

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The US central bank the Fed plans to raise interest rates by 0.75 percentage point after the 9.1% US inflation report for June 2022.

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Much of the economic debate by economists in the US takes place separated by walls from the reality of huge inequalities in the country such as half of retirees having zero savings, the cost of living surge, job insecurity, and two third of children in 4th grade no able to pass the ACT test for reading comprehension. Here economists at the US Fed are cited in a discussion about ultra low interest rates that hurt savers and in particular retirees who number 57 million. Ultra low interest rates lead to wasteful use of capital and misallocation of capital in the US, and were largely a result of the effort to correct for the mistakes of the financial industry causing the crisis of 2009. The US was the leading economy in th world and the standards of living in the US were higher during the post war period 1950-1990 that covered the Kennedy-LBJ, Reagan administrations when inflation was accepted at 4% and interest rates were for the most part around 5-8% on average. As Krugman points in a recent NYT column in August 2023 Fed research has been wrong in estimating the right inflation rate for the economy. The best rate for the economy requires knowledge of and careful judgement about the situation of different parts of the American population, of workers and families that are struggling with the cost of living, and half of retirees with no savings. ...

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With higher mortgage rates at 7% from 4% during the pandemic sellers and buyers are not moving forward. There is a sharp drop in US homes for sale by 14% in June over 2022, to 1.1 million homes, according to NAR. Home builders are building new homes to meet demand. Sellers often prefer to rent out existing homes and rent in their new location. Buyers preferring to rent with limited supply to choose from.

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The Bank of England has left interest rates unchanged at 0.1% and left its quantitative easing program unchanged at 895 billion pounds. Recent reports show central banks are likely to leave rates at almost zero for 3 years.

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Higher inflation and interest rates at 2.2% are having a profound effect on the Japanese economy. Japan is starting a new era of positive interest rates with the first interest rate increase in 17 years this week. Pay raises reached an average of 5.28% in 2023, according to the Japan Trade Union Confederation where the highest for the previous decade was 2.4%. PM Kishida has pursued a course that encourages workers to get needed pay raises. It will affect everything from US mortgages to how much money stays at home and is invested in Japan. Japan holds $4.2 trillion in foreign investment holdings of which $1.1 trillion is in US Treasury bonds. As the differential with US interest rates decreases - varying from 1.5% to 3%- it will increase investment in the Japanese economy and in manufacturing at home. Japan has seen low wages and a hollowing out of its manufacturing sector similar to the US creating a sense of less hope for the future. This shift to investing in Japan is a change for reasons of supply chain reliability and increasing confidence of workers and worker's families in Japan. ...

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Questions may relate more to how these situations affected the role of Gates and similar individuals in protecting the interests of the US, Europe, India, Latin America and Africa in health organizations such as the World Health Organization. As globalization spread governments in the West surrendered some of the essential role they played in world health organizations to individuals and NGO's, and countries lacking experience needed for such an important task. The mishandling of the pandemic is partly a result of this retreat by western governments from the role that they have played during the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the US letter to the WHO by president Trump the role of Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway was shown in handling an earlier virus epidemic that originated in Asia so that it would not spread and could be controlled. This is the H1N1 crisis in 2003 cited in Mr. Trump's letter to the World Health Organization. Brundtland took strong action that was missing during this pandemic after the US and western nations surrendered the essential role they have played for centuries based on role in medical science discovery for maintaining public health. Surrendering this role or seeing it erode is one of the biggest mistakes of our time and a mistaken form of globalized behaviour. It is only now being corrected as the realization dawns on major nations such as US, UK, France, Japan, Russia, India and other countries about the essential stability provided by western nations knowledge, experience and resources to this task of maintaining global health. Even a nation like India has to base its role on hundred or more years of work in medical science and commitment to public health that transcends political preferences or national interest to take on and be a worthy participant with the advanced nations that have played so great and beneficial role for the world in public health. What to speak of transient interest of nations in the developing world or countries where national interest or political preferences play a part in public health of the peoples of the world. This responsibility for world's public health can never be delegated to individuals, foundations or any one country, or small countries, or a combination of these, only to the collective experience of the last 300 years in medical science discovery and the role of Europe including Russia, and the US in leading the way.  The Biden administration has the same underlying concerns as the Trump administration about this mishandling of the pandemic and the disasters that followed bringing so much death and suffering This excerpt on Brundtland of Norway is from the letter the US sent to the World Health Organization- "In 2003, in response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director-General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World Health Organization’s first emergency travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. She also did not hesitate to criticize China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual playbook of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media. Many lives could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example." ...

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The surge in the value of the dollar is creating turmoil in the world economy. The dollar reached 1.04 to the euro and 118 Japanese yen by Dec. 15, 2016. This means Japanese and European exports will be more competitive and lower U.S corporate earnings.  Emerging market economies hold about $200 billion in dollar denominated debt and this will become harder to repay with the surge in the value of the dollar. China faces larger capital outflows and the Bank of Japan has to navigate a new situation. Some countries such as Mexico are raising interest rates to reduce inflation as the value of the peso drops. The prospect of trade wars is also another aspect of uncertainty with the new Trump administration in the U.S.

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Bill Gates on how to improve education in American schools by focussing on excellence in teaching. Excellence in teaching is the single most important variable in education, says Gates. The task, he says, is to identify the excellent teachers and transfer those skills to other teachers. He makes no mention of enriching the teacher pool, by attracting brighter education oriented people from society into teaching. He make some generalizations about class size and teachers studying for advanced degrees, saying they have no impact on educational achievement. This may be relative to the situation, depending on the actual class size and the numbers involved. And higher educational attainment by teachers is hardly a drawback in what the teacher can impart to students. It shows teachers actively engaged in the educational process themselves. Gates talks about improving education without additional spending, but does not address the issue of cuts in education spending in states that are reducing deficits. ...

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Mortgage and other loans taken out at lower interest rates, before the US central bank the Fed started raising rates  in March 2022, is a big part of US household debt. This fact is helping to soften the impact of the Fed's increase of rates by 5% over 16 months. The increase in rates helps savers and retirees earn more on savings kept in CD's. The cut in inflation from 9% in 2022 to 3% in July 2022 helps increase the purchasing power of money. It also helps keep the US economy stronger than other world economies, with the Biden economic plan of increased business investment underpinning strong economic growth of 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023. Wars are not a distraction or cost burden for the economy, with Biden shutting down 2 wars in the Middle East and South Asia. Lessons were learned and Biden has been resolute about this, also giving a singular focus to his plan for rebuilding and renewing America on multiple fronts, infrastructure, fighting climate change, inflation, business investment, and fair taxation so that the fruits of labor are shared equally by all of America's people. Doing this required a clear vision, resolute purpose, and a path to action for each step. Biden has done that in ways that only a few presidents have done in the past. In doing this he has shown that America stands for hope and a better future, a land as he never fails to repeat, a land of possibilities. ...

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US Defense Secretary Gates sees the Wiki discloures on diplomacy as not being as threatening as imagined by government officials and as described. These desriptions are "fairly significantly overwrought" is how Gates puts it. He says these types of disclosures ocurred back in John Adam's presidency and have continued, and the US can work with other countries even if these discloures can be embarrassing. Overall he says the impact is fairly modest.

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This WSJ report shows how a record 4.4 million American workers resigned from their jobs in September 2021 alone. WSJ shows map of US with the states where this is happening marked with "I Quit." States with the largest quit rates have large share of employment  in food, restaurant, hotel and entertainment industries- Hawaii, Montana, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, New Hampshire, Louisiana. In the northeastern states the education sector which accounts for a larger share of employment the quit rate has risen at the fastest pace since January as shown in the Labor Department numbers. For years wages, benefits and working conditions in the food, restaurant, grocery store, hotel and entertainment industries, supply chain logistics, lagged behind, exacerbating inequality and widening the income gaps between working class Americans and the professional and other classes. Increases in minimum wages lagged behind the cost of raising families, rent and grocery bills. Professions such as nursing, children's education, critical to the nation's health were also left behind in wage increases as the tech boom rewarded different sectors in outrageous ways worsening the social divide and creating pools of income scarcity and income abundance in indiscriminate ways. The pandemic is changing all this. Workers in states with higher proportion of workers in these sectors of the economy are saying "I Quit," as they seek better opportunities elsewhere and better working conditions. The checks to working class Americans in 2020-2021 as aid for the pandemic, the child credits, investments in affordable housing, child care, early childhood education, and other aid in the Biden Families and Workers plan are giving workers for the first time in decades the right to choose better working conditions and incomes over worse working conditions and incomes that were set without regard to their role and contribution to the welfare of the whole country and people.  After the lockdowns in the northeastern states, States such as New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island,  with higher vaccination rates and rebound in the economy are seeing higher job openings. This is making it possible for workers in the northeastern US to quit jobs in educational services and other sectors  for better paying jobs, better working conditions, remote work options, and improved work-life balance. ...

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As the period of transition between administrations is a period when no action can be taken on the stimulus plan and 533,0000 jobs were lost in November, with the uncertainties facing the auto industry and more unemplyment expected as that industry donwsizes, and consumers overstretched, the Fed takes aggresssive steps. It reduces the target interest rate, an overnight bank lending rate called the federal funds rate, to between zero and one quarter percentage point. And it added that theat the Fed's policy will be to keep interest rates "exceptionally low " for some time. The 3 month Treasury bill rate, another borrowing rate has gone down to zero.

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How much room is there to raise interest rates. Patrick Minford of the University of Cardiff says a lot more. At the rate of 9-10% inflation in Britain more interest rate increases are likely. Minford is advising Liz Truss who is candidate for prime minister. Minford's main ideas are- Get interest rates back up to what was considered normal in previous decades- 5-7% for mortgage rates is what it used to be. At that rate it protects people's savings something that did not happen in the last 2 decades of ultra low rates worsening the wealth gap for Britons in different classes. Cutting taxes is about providing the economy a boost as rates go up. It is not about huge cuts, just modest cuts like the 30 billion pound cuts proposed by Truss. Minford is not talking about low taxes. He is simply talking about having taxes at levels that will promote growth- "the key to growth is not having high taxes. We're not talking about cutting them, just talking about not having them at catastrophic levels." Here is what Liz Truss is proposing- Reverse the recent rise in national insurance. Scrap the increase in corporation tax. About this plan Minford says- "If we raise corporation tax we will kill off growth." Minford dismisses concerns about borrowing. " It's crazy to begin to try to drop the debt to GDP ratio 5 minutes after Covid." With higher rates Minford also think there will be fewer "zombie" companies eating up the nation's capital, while protecting the savings of hard working ordinary people in Britain which hasn't happened in the last two decades of ridiculously low rates, worsening wealth gaps in British society. Minford calls Sunak's policies "puerile" and too much beholden to Treasury thinking. Liz Truss says Sunak's policies are for Brexit in name only, not taking advantage of Brexit to rid Britain of cautious policy that does not capitalize fully on cutting the bureaucratic and regulatory burden to get growth, and trade that favors Britain. ...

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Neil Irwin of NYT provides some counter intuitive ideas on U.S. Fed interest rate policy. He says it can't be take as a given that the Fed will raise rates in 2017-2018. This depends on how much punch there is in the Trump economic policies for stimulus, and for infrastructure spending, tax cuts. He cites Senate Majority Leader McConnell who said he would like to keep "tax reform revenue neutral." Getting large spending and pushing up the deficit is likely to run up against Republicans in Congress who have for 8 years opposed large spending increases and large deficits. Trump has given few details about his stimulus or infrastructure spending plans. He says the scale of the spending might not match the talk. Irwin cites JP Morgan Chase economists who have kept their forecasts for GDP growth just under 2% for 2017 and 2018. And he points out that even Trump appointees at the Fed might act independently. The Fed might look at being cautious considering that increased trade tensions with China, and the unpredictability of a Trump administration could hurt growth. Irwin does not mention the uncertainty in other areas such as policy towards Russia on which the Republican party and Congress have very different views than Trump, tensions over Taiwan, that can also affect growth. ...