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China is moving to shift its economy in a new direction of self-reliance on domestic consumers and local investors. Mr. Xi calls it "domestic circulation." This also means less dependence on imported technologies and inward looking policies. As the pandemic has reduced demand in other countries and as the U.S. and West tighten controls on imports and introduce new restrictions, there is the sense that the entire policy has to shift quickly to dependence on domestic consumers and investors.

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With the strong jobs growth report in September the US Federal Reserve, America's central bank, is expected to increase interest rates by 0.75% at its meeting on Nov. 1-2. That will be the fourth interest rate increase in 4 consecutive meetings of the Fed. It is designed to tackle inflation yet it also reverses the period of low interest rates for savers that extended from 2000 to 2020. This period covered two crises one created by irresponsible behaviour of banks in the financial crisis of 2000 and the second a natural health disaster from the pandemic when interest rates were brought down to zero as a policy response. During that period savers who suffered decline in savings with little interest income and lower income groups were hit by both the financial crises, employment gaps that hurt income and savings, and the shift of jobs overseas as jobs were shifted to China and American manufacturing declined. Economic policy was determined in that period by economists who failed to grasp the dangers to American manufacturing, to American communities with loss of jobs from offshoring, rising inequality that fragmented society.   This has changed under the Fed run by Mr. Powell first appointed by Mr. Trump and now renominated by Mr. Trump, who is not an economist and brings a very different mindset to central banking, going with common sense about what works for average Americans. a sense of humility, and down to earth about American workers and American manufacturing and its place in America. ...

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This Explainer by Lisa Thomas-Darbois shows how the National Assembly is elected and how it works with the president and their respective powers under the Fifth Republic set up in 1958 during the Algiers Crisis and decolonization by Charles De Gaulle. In 1962 a constitutional amendment led to direct popular election of the president. De Gaulle was elected in 1965. Though De Gaulle resigned in 1968 much of the work of modernizing French agriculture from a backward local regional basis to a national technological basis was done by De Gaulle, and French infrastructure postwar rebuilding started. This was continued through the 5 year presidency of DeGaulle's assistants Pompidou and seven year presidency of Giscard Destaing till 1981, modernizing France over 2 decades. To get elected to the National Assembly one has to get 50% of the vote in the first round and 25% of eligible voters. In the second round only the top two parties and parties with more than 12.5% of vote participate. A change was made to make the president's term 5 years and have the election of the National Assembly after the presidential election. Under this change Macron was able to get a majority in the Assembly after his election as president in 2017. In the event the opposition parties get a majority in the National Assembly cohabitation happens and the prime minister is from the opposition ranks as is likely in 2024. This transfer authority on domestic policy to the majority in the Assembly with foreign policy run by the president. It happened twice under presidetn Mitterand and once under president Chirac. ...

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When even the NYT, or the host of CBS television Face the Nation does it poorly, how are independent voters, and voters leaning Democrat or Republican, or leaning not vote, to have a clear idea of policies?  This review of Trump statements about Harris statements on red meat, ICE, law enforcement, fails to get down to the policies she has stated at Wake Tech in North Carolina and in other places before this. It also does not address the Trump plan to end tax on Social Security which would lead to about $550 going to seniors but lead to a cut of 25% in Social Security in 2032, defunding Social Security and Medicare. Immigration- the first thing Harris would do as president is to sign the legislation written by Republicans Lankford, McConnell with the backing of the party and agreed to by president Biden that will in effect close the Border with Mexico and fix the asylum policy, not done in three decades. Cost of Living- Harris policy on price gouging is for taking the action that companies follow and play by the rule on pricing, so that they do not take unfair advantage of the public. It is not about passing a law or fixing prices. This has been done in Texas and in Kentucky, other states. Restrict rent to 5% increases and increase the supply of new houses by building 3 million new homes, $100 billion to be allocated for fixing housing supply shortages.   ...

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U.S. President Richard Nixon adopted Keynesian policies to boost the economy after tightening monetary policy failed in 1970. In 1971 Nixon turned to higher fiscal spending to get the economy closer to full employment. He also adopted wage and price controls. By 1972 the economy had recovered, inflation was at 5.7% and unemployment at 4.9%, and Nixon won re-election. This was the only recovery in an election year since World War II. In international affairs Nixon's policy was to leave the Bretton Woods system and floating the dollar. With a new administration in 1974 inflation surged to 11% and unemployment to 5.6%, because wage and price controls worked only for a short period.

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Gerard Lemos writes from London about Chinese society today. He was visiting professor to Chongqing University of Business and Technology from 2006 to 2010. During this period he talked to many ordinary Chinese to find out what was on their minds -concerns that stemmed from China's one child policy, urban migration, health care needs, education and jobs were all uppermost in their minds. Lemos says even with the rapid industrial progress the lives of ordinary citizens are affected by fears and uncertainty about the future. The lack of jobs, lack of good healthcare, children who have migrated, are all part of their daily lives. For older people the one child policy in an aging society means the prospect of being alone in old age and the prospect of inadequate health care. For the young education and job concerns. Lemos points out that it is not about a choice between China's model and a Western model, it is more about a search for the Chinese soul, now that the basic material conditions are in place with the usual gaps and problems. At the same time it is a society prone to political sentiment such as the anti-Japanese protests....

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Katy Balls of The Times of London on Charlie Kirk interview during an event in Florida. Kay Balls is The Times Washington Editor. She provides insights into Charlie Kirk who she says was polite in person than on the videos, mostly calling things as he saw it but also willing to engage with others which made him interesting to some young people on campus. His dad is an architect with his own practice who came up with the name TPUSA. The family is Republican and lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The parents wanted him to go to college, first an effort at West Point, then Baylor University, a Christian University in Texas, but he went to Harper College in Illinois. And he decided to drop out after work as a youth activist impressed Republican party organizers.

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Critics such as Senator John McCain say Hagel was affected by micromanagement of defense matters from the White House. The White House maintains close control over policy. One problem seen in the administration is developing policy when no one is sure what the president wants. Only a small circle McDonough, the National Security Advisor Valerie Jarrett, and some NSA officials in the inner circle with the president determine policy. Michele Flournoy and Ashton Carter are considered as replacement for Hagel.

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Jeanne Whalen on the Two Speed Economy in the US September 2025- diverging paths of low and high income Americans. With the new administration in 2025 priorities shift to immigration and what to do about 14 million illegal migrants from Latin America and other places, war on fentanyl and drug trafficking gangs with hundreds of thousands of lives lost to fentanyl and drugs in the US, crime and safety which includes the unprecedented illegal movement of drug trafficking in the Nation, and to a bold posture on using US advantages of its huge market to get European Union, Japan, South Korea, and China to level the playing field on trade bring jobs home.The Biden administration had already conceded to DJT's approach in its one term presidency by shifting on uncontrolled illegal migration but not fast enough, by not removing DJT's tariffs, and failing to take an aggressive posture on fentanyl and drug trafficking. Of the DJT plan US has tariff based revenues of 10--15% for all countries imports into US can that it redirect to groups to soften any effects of tariffs. DJT administration oil transition policy of stretching out the transition to give middle class and lower classes cost of living relief was also accepted by the Biden administration and is now the policy of Democrat run California state government.  The US economy was slowing in 2024 under the Biden administration. What has changed in 2025 is that the US stock markets are responding to steps taken by the DJT Republican administration to lower the cost of doing business by softening regulations, and giving US business the upper hand in different industries, and rebuilding the manufacturing sector with calls for EU and Japan/South Korea to invest more in the US as a quid pro quo for market access. This has led to increase in the value of market portfolios of the income earners above 250,000, or 10% of American households. As this happens the process of trade renegotiation has introduced some uncertainty in 2025 and businesses are looking for more clarity before increasing investment and slowing job hiring which hurts younger people entering the job market and lower income Americans. Were things better under Biden? Government Covid assistance and payouts in the early years 2020-2021 helped lower income workers, as this faded and the cost of living autos, housing increased sharply under Biden in 2022-2024 the situation deteriorated. The situation today is similar to the situation in 2024 with the difference in 2025 that inflation is coming down just as government help is receding. And added factor is the DJT administration plan to tackle head on the increasing cost of Medicaid to about $1 trillion by adding new requirements and reducing subsidies. The federal workforce had a disproportionate share of black workers and the policy changes to reduce the federal workforce have increased black unemployment from 6.1% under Biden in August 2024 to 7.5 % a year later. Hispanics have seen slight improvement in unemployment to 5.3% in 2025, and the middle class incomes also have held up and are holding steady. Meantime Bloomberg points out that one third of people in the top 10% are living paycheck by paycheck because of high cost of housing, university education for children, and inflation.     ...

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Mr. Peter Navarro, 70, a key advisor to president Trump on trade and economic policy, is now the DPA policy coordinator.  Mr. Navarro takes on the presidential task force role of coordinating government-business cooperation with wartime powers under the Defense Production Act. Mr. Navarro says in an interview with the WSJ that he will take tough measures if necessary. Saying this is no time for delay, to hoard or price gouge, companies must move quickly or the government will clear the obstacles. "This is war. When there are bumps in the road, President Trump is going to knock them down immediately and unmercifully."  A California Economics professor Mr. Navarro warned about the virus and epidemics of this kind in a 2006 book. He now assumes this role after president Trump said about GM "always a mess," after long negotiations with GM leading to a shrinking supply of ventilators and government frustration. President Trump then used DPA powers to order GM to make ventilators and lined up 5 other manufacturers in 2 days. Navarro says he is following Trump time which he has in his office. This meaning he and the president will use the full arsenal of federal powers to get things done in record time.  ...

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Peter Eavis of WSJ cautions about the ability of the Fed to manage things after a flood-the-zone policy of central banking, because such a policy is hard to reverse and create stable effects for the long term.

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Stephen Miller, as both intellectual and organizer, is shaping policy on immigration at the White House as adviser to Kristi Noem, head of Homeland Security. He is a dedicated follower of DJT and White House deputy chief of staff. He also brought Prof. Navarro to the attention of DJT on trade policies.  He was a key figure in the first DJT administration at the age of 31 having served as communications secretary for Senator Jeff Sessions and developed his ideas during the period with Sessions. As director of speech writing and senior adviser to DJT,  he wrote some of president DJT's policy speeches in the first term, the speech to the Republican National Convention 2016 , and the Inaugural Address of 2017,  including the speech on Jan. 6th 2020 following the storming of the Capitol building.  Who is Stephen Miller? He comes from a Jewish family that immigrated in his grandfather's generation in 1903 to Ellis Island from Belarus, during a period of discrimination in Russian regions. During the period on campus at Duke University where he graduated in Political Science, Miller was a follower of a prolific author, David Horowitz. Horowitz was part of the Jewish leftist intellectual movement in New York in the post war period, but after the 1980's joined the Reagan movement and questioned the ideas he had believed in, questioned what he saw as the antisemitism on US campuses. At Santa Monica public school in California in 2000-2003 Stephen Miller questioned the multiculturalism that replaced the America of the founding fathers, that he saw at the school. It is this perspective that also underlies Stephen Miller's ideas about universities, about immigration, about the economy and China under Bush, Obama and Biden. Miller is also an organizer as he set up the America First Legal in 2020 with funding from donors on the right which has filed many lawsuits during Biden's term in office.  ...

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USC Justices Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett questioning Solicitor General Sauer, and lawyer for the small business Katyal, on Tariffs by the US president DJT in November 2025. Coney Barrett says the whole thing is a big mess. Treasury Secretary Bessent who watched the proceedings in the Court benches says the issue of fentanyl is one of the reasons for tariffs on China which has played a uncooperative role on this issue of fentanyl sourced by drug trafficking gangs on America's borders. Bessent saying that it is a policy tool when unfriendly powers seek to hurt America. DJT says a SCOTUS ruling against the Tariffs would reduce America to Third World status. Most American themselves are being told by the media interests that the issue of young Americans dying from fentanyl is an issue like many others not that it is the heart of the issue that more Americans have died from fentanyl than the youth of America who died in the Korean, Vietnam and First World Wars combined. The wine import company with 19 employees whose lawyer Katyal filed a petition to SCOTUS is a tiny part of the people harmed by tariffs. It could easily be compensated from the tariffs revenue of $500 billion in 2025-2026 as could other businesses. How does the SCOTUS decide what policy the US is to use. With recalcitrant Asian nations Japan and China the only way is years of negotiations that lead nowhere on world trade. Is SCOTUS responsible or Congress to the American people when the supply chain disruptions caused by concentration of the supply chain in China led to huge price increases making life unaffordable for the low income earners,  including cost of automobiles? Large companies acting on the DJT signals are reducing this concentration in China actively, the trade deficit is coming down, the tariffs revenue is a fund to offset the cost to Americans mostly smaller businesses as large businesses increased their margins in 2022-2024 pricing moves so that today only about 30% of the tariff cost is borne by the average Americans, the rest by large businesses and some of it by exporters in China and Japan. ...

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Bolton warns that the policy of negotiating with Iran has failed. He points to the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia's intention to acquire a nuclear weapon in the rivalry between Shiite Iran and the Sunni led coalition led by the Saudis.

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Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman meets IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva to discuss impact of the geopolitical situation on world growth especially oil prices. Sitharaman said India was pursuing a policy of strong federal spending with capital expenditures increasing by 35% for fiscal 2022-23 to continue a public investment led recovery, raising capital expenditures from 5.5 lakh crore rupees to 7.5 lakh crore rupees. Indian GDP growth is now expected at 8-8.5%, the highest of large economies. Sitharaman also met with Indonesian finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati on the sidelines of G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting and discussed the current global situation.

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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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The NYT's Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida look at the relationship between Shinjo Abe and Fumio Kishida of Japan. Both entered parliament at the same time in 1993, and both are sons and grandsons of members of parliament. Mr. Abe took the lead and when it resigned in 2021 Kishida was not his first choice to succeed him in the Liberal Democratic Party, Kishida sees increasing defense spending as on of the realities of the changing situation in Asia and the Japanese public now supports this. Kishida is pursuing a different economic policy with an effort to reduce economic inequality which he sees as a problem similar to the US and Europe.

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The Guardian follows key speeches and developments at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. This comes as the Labour party leads the Conservatives in the MRP poll by 12 points 45 percentage points to 33 points. Labour is favored in its approach to the cost of living crisis and climate change. Keir Starmer is steadily closing the credibility gap created by previous Labour administrations on policy for families and workers and conviction which has given Boris Johnson and Liz Truss an advantage in the past. Mr. Biden has faced and overcome a similar problem created by Democratic administrations in the past of a lack of conviction to help families and workers in the US.

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WSJ report by Jon Emont warns that Indonesia has too much capital going into mineral resource develooment such as lithium and too little for development of a manufacturing bas as is happening in neighbors India and Vietnam. Indonesia lags far behind in manufacturing and as the supply chain shifts with its aging population there is need for policies that build the kind of infrastructure that is needed for foreign investment in factories in Indonesia that can employ its young people. Emont says just seeing that 60% of young people are employed in the informal sectors such as delivery and  transport is not the policy for a country with a large young demographic.

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Conventional monetary policy is ineffective in a liquidity trap. At that point short term interest rates are at zero, and conventional monetary policy is ineffective at this zero bound. Unconventional policies such as buying long term Treasury bonds by the Federal Reserve may be adopted, but their effectiveness has not been proven. This is something the Fed is attempting to do in the U.S. after the 2008 financial crisis. This was tried in Japan in a deflationary situation and the results did not show conclusively that it works, because Japan remained at a borderline deflationary situation for years while this policy was implemented by the Bank of Japan. The $600 billion bond buying program of the U.S. Fed in late 2010, known as QE II, was implemented to reduce the chance of deflation taking hold and to stimulate growth. Krugman and others argue for the need of fiscal policy and government spending to step in to support the unconventional monetary policy. This becomes more difficult to do with the increasing budget deficit the U.S. is facing in 2011....

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CIA nominee John Brennan and the policy of targeted killings using high tech drones of the Obama administration.

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Discussion at a U.S. Fed meeting in Jan 28-29, 2014, as revealed in the minutes for that meeting. It shows Fed officials such as Bullard of the St Louis Fed asked for a debate on interest rates, but most Fed oficials at the meeting including Lockhart of the Atlanta Fed, supported current tapering policy to wind down bond purchases buy the end of 2014. Some of the discussion went to how fast the unemployment rate had declined from 7.9% to the 6.5% threshold set by the Fed, and what this meant as other signs show weakness in the U.S. economy. The drop in the unemployment rate reflected more older workers retiring and to an unusual degree discouraged workers dropping out and not looking for work. Should the Fed put more weight on inflation and financial stability some officials argued, especially as inflation was still about a percentage point below the 2% target by some estimates.

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Fed vice chair Lael Brainard is president Biden's choice to replace Brian Deese as director National Economic Council. She would help Biden at a crucial period for the US economy with recession fears and inflation, and aggressive interest policy of the Fed's Jay Powell to slow inflation. Brainard is a daughter of a US diplomat who became interested in economics after living in Poland and Germany, and seeing how countries so close to each other divided by the Iron Curtain followed very different economic policies.

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The debate in France about the need for a new policy to boost manufacturing at home. The planned closure of a Bridgestone factory in Bethune in northern France in 2021 provides another example of the effect on local communities with closing of plants. The French government has pledged to relocate more production back to France. About 15 billion euros of a 100 billion euros package to fight the effects of the pandemic on the economy will go to relocate sectors and boost local manufacturing and jobs.