Free Republic

An instant industry has developed in Canada about how to adjust to a Trump presidency, as if the nature of the United States has metamorphosed instantly and unrecognizably. Almost all of this concern is unnecessary. Donald Trump has never expressed any grievances against Canada, and his limited experiences here, from skiing in the Laurentians to putting his name on a few buildings for a good fee, (which some local idiots have threatened to take down and have made the subject of demonstrations), have been agreeable. Canada actually runs a modest trade deficit with the United States, and Trump has made...

SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico -- Ford Motor Co's (F.N) abrupt move to scrap a planned $1.6 billion car plant in central Mexico has spooked a network of suppliers who bet on a growing customer base and dramatized the risk that Donald Trump's agenda poses to the country's broader economy. Many auto parts makers had started to expand in anticipation of Ford's plant in the state of San Luis Potosi, where industry is "easily 70 percent" dependent on the auto sector, said Julian Eaves, managing director of Preferred Compounding de Mexico, a U.S.-owned maker of rubber compounds operating here. "It's going...

To be fair, the list is 13 risks long and it’s mostly populism driven. But there is some Elon, as advertised: And note, as Barc’s commods team does, that “Indices are already pricing in record levels of volatility as 2017 begins, and investors are specifically concerned about geopolitical developments.” Finally by way of additional context, and as a reminder that commods did ok in 2016: Hard to disagree with Citi's Matt King – the orderliness of markets recently – even with the bond sell-off – has been striking and strange: pic.twitter.com/wUZppgxjRC — Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) January 5, 2017

INDUSTRIAL policy via Twitter is a new development in economics but we may all have to get used to it over the next four (or eight) years. Donald Trump's tweets on the car industry (and his planned cuts to corporate income tax) may or may not have persuaded Ford to keep a plant in Michigan, creating 700 jobs. But the problem with such headline-grabbing is that there are thousands of companies in America, and jobs are being created or destroyed every day; intervening in all these situations is impossible. Even in cars, for example, GM has recently announced 3,300 lay-offs,...

The employment report out on Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET is expected to show that the economy added 175,000 jobs in December, continuing the solid trend of recent months. But the real focus will be on wage growth and the jobless rate, which both delivered big surprises in last month's report. After the rise in average hourly earnings hit a seven-year high of 2.8% in October, wages backslid in November, slipping 0.1% and bringing the annual rate down to 2.5%. Friday's report could indicate whether that was just a statistical quirk. The consensus view is that December's report will show...

President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his campaign promising to reduce taxes for American businesses and families. His Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin, along with Congress, now bear the weight of seeing that promise fulfilled, namely through comprehensive tax reform. Fortunately, a healthy bipartisan appetite exists for lowering the business tax rate, simplifying the code and applying it in a uniform fashion that does not penalize success. There's good reason that America's antiquated and labyrinthine tax code was a frequent target on the campaign trail. Our statutory corporate rate of nearly 40% (combined federal and state) is the highest in...

Health Reform: Remember when Democrats were promising that ObamaCare would cut the deficit by $1 trillion in its second decade? Turns out they were off by, well, about $1 trillion. A report from the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that, left in place, ObamaCare would reduce the deficit by between $350 billion and $150 billion over the next 10 years... ... it assumes (based on official estimates from government agencies) that ObamaCare will reduce Medicare spending a total of $1.1 trillion... ...everyone who knows anything about Medicare knows that cuts of this magnitude aren't even remotely realistic......

What he and his fellow Republicans in Congress do will largely determine the direction of the economy and equities It’s the New Year and time for pundits and gurus of all stripes to roll out our predictions for 2017. No matter how right or wrong we were in the past, we’ll make this year’s predictions with serene self-assurance. Although Republicans swept the White House and the Congress in last year’s election, politics and policy will likely dominate 2017 even more than they defined 2016. Why? Because last year, except for Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, which pummeled...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/how-trump-won-the-white-working-class

Stanley Black & Decker is opening a new $35 million manufacturing plant in the United States to help it rebuild, and perhaps more importantly "re-Americanize," the Craftsman tool brand it just bought from Sears Holdings. While the extra capacity should help get a once-iconic $2 billion a year line back on its feet, the move also potentially offers Stanley Black & Decker another benefit: shielding it from a potential surge in economic nationalism under President-elect Donald Trump. Though Stanley Black & Decker chief executive James Loree did not mention Trump by name in his comments to Wall Street analysts and...

If President-elect Donald Trump is going to meet his pledge to energize the U.S. economy, there's a simple yet tough way to do so: Put more men to work. The proportion of men in their prime working years who either have a job or are looking for one has been dropping for decades – and limiting economic growth in the process. The full brunt of the 60-year decline burst into view during the 2016 election. Trump triumphed in part by vowing to restore jobs at steel mills, auto plants and coal mines – the types of work that had once...

Regulation: As President Obama continues his bizarre last-minute regulatory siege without letup, Donald Trump has made it clear he'll undo most of the unneeded rules once he's in office. And Congress hopes to make it very easy for him to do. As he heads for the exits, Obama is engaged in a frenzy of regulation, intended to hamstring American businesses and reward green groups and unions. But while the pace has picked up recently, it's really nothing new. As Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner has noted, Obama's "lame duck administration poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at...

Rules: You have to laugh at the Democrats' current plight. They have almost no leverage to block anyone Donald Trump decides to select for judgeships or cabinet posts. They can't stop Republicans from repealing most of ObamaCare. And they only have themselves to blame. On CNN this week, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was lamenting the fact that Democrats wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stop Trump's nominees. There should, he said, be "60 votes because on such important positions there should be some degree of bipartisanship." And who, exactly, is to blame for this? Schumer's predecessor in...

Stock investors have long looked to January to tell them where the market might be headed for the rest of the year. And for good reason: Over the long haul, the-first-month-of-the-year indicator has seemed to work pretty well. Historically, stocks have tended to rise in January. And in general, when stocks were up at the end of January, eleven months later shares logged a positive year; when January was down, shares ended the year in the red. Only 27% of the time since 1929 have the market and January parted ways, according to data from Standard & Poor's. That seems...

A bill backing key changes in the H1-B programme that allows skilled workers from countries like India to fill high-tech jobs in the US has been re-introduced in the US Congress by two lawmakers who claim that it will help crack down on the work visa abuse. The ‘Protect and Grow American Jobs Act’ makes important changes to the eligibility requirements for H1-B Visa exemptions was re-introduced on Wednesday by Republican Darrell Issa and Scott Peters—both from California. The bill among other things increase the minimum salary of H-1B visa to $100,000 per annum and eliminate the masters degree exemption....

Trade: Ford's decision to build a factory in the U.S. instead of Mexico, saving 700 jobs, is a good thing. But is it because Ford fears what Donald Trump might do to it, or because it thinks the corporate environment will be so much better under Trump than under Obama? And, yes, the answer really matters. Ford's move to invest $700 million in Michigan, creating about 700 new jobs here has created quite a political stir. The new plant, slated for Flat Rock, Mich., will make cutting-edge electric and self-driving cars, which Ford has said will likely outsell traditional cars...

South Africa, people who speak Afrikaans use the word "robot" to mean the same thing it means in English. But it is also the word for "traffic light." Why? Before automated signals, motorists on busy streets were directed by police officers standing on platforms. Those cops were automated out of a job. This bit of trivia comes from the dazzling new book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, by University of Illinois at Chicago economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey. She points out that automation and robots are nothing new, that they are crucial to raising...

As the new Congress convenes, budget cutters are eyeing Medicare, citing predictions the program for seniors is running out of money. But federal bean counters have erroneously predicted Medicare's bankruptcy for decades. One mistake is they don't consider medical breakthroughs. Another problem is medical ethicists like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who insist the elderly are a burden, and resources would be better spent on the young. Don't believe it. New medical findings show how wrong this thinking is... ...Someone who lives to 97 needs only about half as much end-of-life care as someone who dies at 68. Surprised? Myth has it...

An essential element of the “unorthodox” doctrines, advanced both by all socialists and by all interventionists, is that the recurrence of depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the very operation, of the market economy. But while the socialists contend that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism can eradicate the evil, the interventionists ascribe to the government the power to correct the operation of the market economy in such a way as to bring about what they call “economic stability.” These interventionists would be right if their antidepression plans were to aim at a radical abandonment of credit expansion policies....

Ford Motor announced Tuesday that it would not invest in new manufacturing operations in Mexico, and instead would create 700 new jobs in Michigan. This follows on the heels of a similar announcement by the United Technologies unit, Carrier, in November that it would save hundreds of jobs at an Indiana plant, and not move them to Mexico. These moves did not take place in a vacuum. In each case, the companies faced an implicit, and sometimes explicit, threat from President-elect Donald Trump. And it will be fascinating to watch what GM ultimately does in response to Trump's tweet Tuesday...