Ikenomic Insights

  (Originally published at Forbes .) The conduct of U.S. trade policy in recent years has served to squander America’s soft power and deplete a once deep reservoir of international good will toward the United States. Since 2017, Washington has turned its back on trade agreements, thumbed its nose at the rules-based trading system it created, massively subsidized efforts to draw global production capacity to the United States, and imposed punishing trade restrictions on countries rich and poor. Although a rapidly evolving geopolitical environment may justify certain policy changes , depriving U.S. consumers of anti-inflationary imports, throttling the economies of important allies, and providing greater opportunities for China to win over the Global South constitutes a lot of collateral damage. Yet Washington forges ahead, sticking to script and disregarding consequences. On October 22, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) will hold a hearing to decide whether the domestic...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) On the occasion of his 100 th  birthday last week, former-President Jimmy Carter received praise from across the political spectrum for his leadership in freeing important parts of the U.S. economy from the asphyxiating tentacles of the regulatory state.  Writing in the  Wall Street Journal , former Senator Phil Graham (R-TX) credited Carter’s deregulation of the airlines, trucking, railroad, energy, and communications sectors as reforms that made possible the quarter-century economic boom that began in the Reagan years.  We desperately  need  that kind of leadership today. Since 2009, federal regulatory excess has reemerged as one of the greatest threats to U.S. economic dynamism. The financial services and banking sectors – both critical infrastructure to virtually every other industry in the economy – are routinely in the crosshairs of regulators who consider Wall Street an adversary to restrain, rather than a v...