Ikenomic Insights

  (Originally published at Forbes .) On the third day of his first term in office, President Trump committed a monumental foreign policy error that undermines U.S. economic security to this day. By withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement to strengthen trade and investment ties with countries around China’s periphery, Trump extinguished with the stroke of a pen important leverage that could have deterred Beijing’s coercive and subversive behavior of the past decade. In the waning days of his tenure, President Biden can mitigate the consequences of Trump’s geopolitical blunder and reinforce his own administration’s “latticework” of initiatives to strengthen alliances in the Indo-Pacific by simply not blocking Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the United States Steel Corporation. But recent leaks suggesting that Biden intends to block the deal call into question the sincerity of his administration’s commitments to U.S. allies and improvin...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) No matter how well-intentioned a policy goal or noble a humanitarian cause, there are always tradeoffs to weigh before deciding on a course of action. But sometimes certitude, righteousness, and demonization of the unconvinced blinds us to the imperative of assessing those costs and consequences. Climate activists offer a deeply concerning case in point. While their demands for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are qualitatively reasonable and relatable, they tend to believe the existential branding of their cause excuses them of the obligation to account for the costs of their mitigation plans. The “no-cost-is-too-high” mindset has emboldened activists and public officials in the U.S. to bring lawsuits against entities across the fossil fuel supply chain. Their objective is to drive up the costs of extracting, refining, distributing, and using oil, natural gas, and coal to the point that electric bills are unaffordable and the economics of inve...

  (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...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) After months of signaling disapproval of Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid to acquire U.S. Steel, President Biden deferred his decision on the fate of that deal until after the election. Hopefully that buys him time to appreciate the enormous economic and geopolitical costs of blocking that transaction on national security grounds. An honest assessment will find the proposed acquisition does not threaten national security, but the president’s rejection of the deal definitely would. One need not be hawkishly predisposed to notice that threats to U.S. critical infrastructure and our commercial and strategic interests are proliferating. It should also be obvious that those threats do not come from Japan, but predominantly from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The governments in those countries are intent on undermining U.S. power and influence, and the institutions and alliances that reinforce that power and influence. It would be a colossal m...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) 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 2...