Trump is on collision course with its trading partners: the U.S. trade deficit apparently proves that the U.S. is being fooled by its foreign trading partners that sell more to the U.S. than that they buy in return. Hence, Trump thinks that he can “win” a trade war by slapping on import tariffs until the trade deficit with any given individual country exactly equals zero. Any country that has a trade deficit with the U.S. is at risk of Trump’s insanity.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China recently announced its plans to scrap the two-term limit on its presidency, which would mean that Chinese president Xi Jinping can continue in power after the end of his second term in 2022. This news was largely frowned upon by the Western world and is often explained as a step toward an increasingly totalitarian state. But is this a bad development? Or are these plans understandable from a Chinese perspective?

From a Western democratic

What a difference can a few days make! When on February 2 it was announced that wages in the U.S. rose by 2.9 percent (and that, after a revision, wages in December rose a bit more than previously estimated), stock market prices began to swing violently. Stock market indexes lost hundreds of points per minute and long-term interest rates rose to heights last seen in 2014. At times, investors even began to believe that the official rate in the US will be raised four times and not three times, as the central bank had more or less promised.

All these things played out days after a meeting of the Fed’s interest-rate-setting committee (FOMC) at the end of January. This week, the minutes of this meeting were released to the public. How did Fed members expect the US economy to develop in 2018