The big story this past week has been the pomp and circumstance of China’s 19th Party Congress and its centerpiece, President Xi Jinping’s lengthy speech. In spite of many columns of analysis, there have been no public surprises. You’ll find my favorite article below, “Why Do We Keep Writing About Chinese Politics As If We Know More Than We Do?”

Real disputes among professional economists rarely make their way into political debates. But that’s what’s happened with the issue of whether the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would mainly benefit shareholders or workers. Both sides make coherent arguments – but in the end, the evidence supports the proposal’s opponents.

The countries worst affected by the financial crisis, the United States and especially the United Kingdom, have since experienced severe political turbulence. I believe this can be directly traced back to the financial crisis and the way it was dealt with by governments, central banks and the financial elite.

Essentially, the general public came to the view that the elites’ first priority in the crisis was to look after each other. They were the first to get into the lifeboats.

I am sharing a copy of my new article on PRC activities in Brazil that originally appeared in Newsmax.

While partly related to Brazil's size, it is of note that, largely unnoticed in Washington D.C., Brazil is one of the countries in Latin America where the most significant major Chinese commercial advances have occurred during the past year.

Gradually, inch by painful inch, the central bankers are losing their clothes – the comforting ideology that has enveloped them like a warm garment for more than a generation. This is the ideology, or “regime”, of central bank independence and inflation targeting (CBI+IT). Oh, how shy they are! Look how they hold onto any scraps!

Last Sunday I gave a speech at the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy. The center website quotes Adlai Stevenson, who twice ran for president in the 1950's: "A free society is a society in which it is safe to be unpopular." Never was that more true or more apt than today.

A leading economist has predicted that central banks will not remain independent much longer. His forecast was made  at  a Bank of England conference called to celebrate – yes – 20 years of independence. Guests included Mrs Theresa May, the Prime Minster. It was opened by the Governor, Mark Carney, who drew a different, but equally startling, lesson from the crisis.

Willem Buiter, chief economist of Citi, put up two slides where he declared that: