Ikenomic Insights

(Originally published at  Forbes .)  Amid elevated living costs and stubbornly high inflation rates, President Biden has been scrambling to make amends. Bothered by high gas prices? No worries. POTUS will tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – even absent “strategic” necessity. Don’t want to pay back your college loans? Uncle Joe will launder your liabilities in the Treasury’s general assets account – never mind the stealth burden on taxpayers and the Supreme Court ruling against it . Want to jump ship to a business rival after receiving job training or learning sensitive trade secrets? The president will swipe his pen to void the non-compete clause in your private employment contract. Unionized steelworker or construction hardhat working on infrastructure? Scranton Joe’s got your back, shutting out imports and foreign competition , and subsidizing your paychecks with the taxes paid by Americans across the income spectrum. Really, it’s enough to make the late Huey Long blush. Of cour

 (Originally published in Forbes .) From banning “non-compete” clauses to re-requiring “net-neutrality” to hyperinflating the costs of taxpayer-funded infrastructure with extravagant union giveaways, the Biden administration has overseen a massive expansion of the regulatory state . But amid this regulatory incontinence, which sows uncertainty, suppresses innovation, and retards investment and growth, there are encouraging signs that Congress, the courts, and US entrepreneurs are fed up with rule by executive fiat. Take, for example, the escapades of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since assuming power, Biden’s approach to cryptocurrencies and related technologies has been to delegate and defer to an activist SEC and its crusading chairman, Gary Gensler. Chairman Gensler portrays the crypto industries as “ rife with hucksters, fraudsters, [and] scam artists , ” which, he seems to believe, excuses him from proposing and promulgating concrete rules, in compliance with statute, fo

  (Originally published in  Forbes .) Popular on the left is this trope that Washington’s unwavering commitment to free markets is responsible for the demise of America’s once mighty manufacturing sector. A mutation of that belief infecting the “new right” holds that US security is imperiled by Washington’s failure to harness industry’s capacity and direct it toward national economic and social objectives. These strange ideological bedfellows are seeking more federal intervention in the industrial economy, when most manufacturers – and most objective observers – see need for much less. The interventionists speak of the importance of the industrial economy. They say a vibrant manufacturing sector attracts investment in R&D and that innovation drives productivity and wage growth. They say robust manufacturing capacity is essential to national security, while manufacturing facilities and jobs are important to our social fabric. They say the shuttering of factories over the past couple

(Originally published in Forbes .)  Innovation is essential to economic growth and higher living standards. Better tools and techniques that make us more productive are requirements of wealth creation. Still, innovation attracts its fair share of skeptics whose fears about where new technologies may lead are ripe for exploitation. Helming the regulatory agencies in Washington, today, are many who seem to prey on fears about the nefarious misuse of technology or how innovation will send our jobs and way of life into obsolescence. Yet, with every new wave of technological uptake, the U.S. economy has created more and better paying jobs than existed before, owing to the increasing abundance produced and invested. Such progress would be impossible without entrepreneurs and their innovations. Consider blockchain – one of the most important innovations to emerge from the financial technology revolution of the past couple decades. Blockchain is most commonly associated with cryptocurrencies—d

 (Piece originally published at Forbes ) U.S. policymakers portray the United States as the most open, transparent, rules-based economy in the world. Such moral preening is meant to excuse Washington's protectionism as exceptional and virtuous – trade restrictions imposed reluctantly and merely to level a proverbial playing field made unlevel by the actions of rule-breaking foreign companies and governments. But there is nothing virtuous about the biased , often capricious , and increasingly lawless administration of America’s so-called “unfair trade” laws. Facially, U.S. antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) laws allow U.S. industries to seek and obtain special tariffs on imports determined to be sold at prices that cause or threaten to cause them injury. The laws are presumed to guard against foreign companies selling products at artificially low prices in order to knock out their American competition and establish dominance in the U.S. market. In reality, these laws ar

  (Originally published on Forbes.com) No single country in the world attracts more foreign direct investment than the United States. And no country’s businesses have invested more in the United States than Japan’s. That should be cause for celebration and flute-clinking in Washington this week, where President Biden is hosting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. But Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel has rendered discussion of cross-border investment a bit uncomfortable. Rather than reiterate why Biden’s position is bad for the economy, bad for bilateral relations, bad for U.S. soft power, and bad for the administration’s whole “friendshoring” thing, this piece will toast some of the good things about the bilateral investment relationship that probably won’t make it into the official record. Let’s start with some statistics . The value of the stock of foreign direct investment in the United States (on a historical cost basis as of the end of 202