Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…He’s hooked on that part. I think he would focus on that part. I think he would really love it. He would be very alarmed by the idea of tariffs and very alarmed by the return to protectionism. I think he believed that part of what made the world peaceful in the second half of the 20th century, as opposed to during World War II, was the world was knit together more by trade. And that was the great hope that if people traded with each other, they wouldn’t fight. He was also a proponent of the free movement of capital. He would absolutely oppose this idea that Nippon Steel wasn’t allowed to invest in the United States. I think he would struggle, and he wholeheartedly embraced Reagan, and he worked to minimize the parts of the Reagan legacy he didn’t like. I think he would find it harder to embrace Trump because he’s not of that style, and he just had a different style. But I’m guessing he would’ve come around through the… I think he would just say, “Okay, we have a chance to reduce the size of government.” At the same time, the spending plans of the Trump administration are not fiscally conservative in any way, and that was his concern, was not so much with debt but with the feeling that there’s no mechanism to stop the growth of government, that it just grows and grows and grows. And so he ended up believing even deficits aren’t so bad because they make politicians cautious, he thought, about continuing to spend, but I have to believe he would be concerned about the potential threats to the US currency’s position as the world’s reserve currency with increased levels of debt and spending. He was concerned about low interest rates. He died, I think it’s 2004, 2006, but it was in the beginning, he didn’t see the zero low bound, but he saw low interest rates. And he said, “This isn’t necessarily good. Everyone’s talking about low interest rates as if they’re good, but there should be a price on capital. There should be a price on this. It shouldn’t be so low.” And so he had still the macro insights that I think are important. You wrote The Wall Street Journal essay titled How Inflation Ended Neoliberalism and Re-elected Trump, so can we weave that into this discussion in terms of inflation and Trump? What’s the main idea of the essay?…

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