Recent comments by Paul A. Myers

• Lives versus Profits

  The gene companies "typed" the DNA of today's Supreme Court and have concluded that now is the time to push the fight. This Supreme Court is moving jurisprudence in the US back to about 1897 and the waves from its decisions will lap right up to the side of the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessey v Ferguson. How very clever: use the New Medicine to throw average Americans into a modern form of debt peonage!

• The Erosion of Europe

  Political leaders need to pull together an integrated set of policy proposals that lead to convergence in the intermediate term that would sustain growth. The credibility of such a program is necessary to build the political support to embark on a program of short-term stimulus to re-start growth.
  
  But short-term money is not going to come unless there is a credible belief in the intermediate term plan.

• The World Without America

  The US economy may be poised for more productive future growth because during the recovery 5 million plus jobs have been added, virtually all of them in the private sector. Public employment is a smaller and leaner part of the overall employment pie. This is an important structural change indicating future strength.
  
  In contrast, "burgeoning debt" is a conservative bogeyman and as a problem is rapidly coming under control. Most likely, the US should borrow more and invest more.
  
  With future public budgets subject to greater constraint primarily due to rising health expenditures, the US will most likely reconfigure its military forces away from large land forces and more towards sea and air power. Sea and air power are efficient tools for keeping lines of commerce open--the big strategic need for the world economy--and for containing difficult situations such as Iran or North Korea. Containment has worked well for America in the past; it will again in the future.
  
  New methods of engaging the restive Muslim world must be developed by both the US and the world community at large. We are moving into a new era on the journey away from colonialism and imperialism where the whole concept of the Western national state is getting redefined in this part of the world.
  
  The American public is withdrawing its support for the current military and foreign policies of the US, in particular in the Middle East and South Asia, for the simple reason that they have not worked and can be seen to continue not to work. That is what lies behind the inertia on Syria.

• The Trapdoors at the Fed’s Exit

  I think the political resistance in Congress to a rapid increase in interest rates will be immense and beyond the Fed board's power to resist. So I would first expect inflation, which might be tolerated for a long time, and then possibly a recession-inducing increase in interest rates.
  
  Inflation will devalue a lot of government benefits. Price controls in the health care sector?

• The Collapsing Arab State

  The next phase in the history of the Middle East does indeed seem to be the splintering of artificially created nation states, relics of the imperial and colonial past, into smaller discrete substates defined by ethnicity and religion. One could hope that this would lead to cultural and ethnic equilibrium and a great diminution of violence. The phase after this might be economic cooperation and loose economic confederation.
  
  One remains very skeptical that the American foreign policy establishment is accepting of this paradigm. On the other hand, it is probably powerless to stop it since it is unlikely to intervene with enough military and economic resources to bend the outcome to its outmoded way of thinking.