(March 25, 2017) US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin already finds himself hemmed in on all sides.
Domestic constraints come from the promises that he and President Trump have made and the laws of arithmetic. How, for example, is he ever going to be able to reconcile the specific tax proposals that candidate Trump campaigned on with the promise of the “Mnuchin rule” that taxes won’t be cut for the rich?
(7/20/2015) Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, has the chance to play a role for his country analogous to the roles played by Korean President Kim Dae Jung in 1997 and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002.
(3/23/2015) We are at the 30th anniversary of the 1985 Plaza Accord. It was the most dramatic intervention in the foreign exchange market since Nixon originally floated the US currency. At the end of February 1985 the dollar reached dizzying heights, which remain a record to this day. Then it began a long depreciation, encouraged by a shift in policy under the new Treasury Secretary, James Baker, and pushed down by G-5 foreign exchange intervention. People remember only the September 1985 meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City that ratified the policy shift; so celebrations of the 30th anniversary will wait until this coming fall.