“Today, we’ll talk about jet fuel, the good news/bad news situation for China, and more. For the time being, yes. The U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is starting to actually work, though the Iranian fuel kept in floating storage or already on the ocean is unaffected. Of course, the products a blockade does prevent from safe passage only deepens the damage to the global economy. There has been talk of more talks between the U.S. and Iran, but nothing finalized. I spent Wednesday in LAX and O’Hare Airport in Chicago, and things looked relatively normal. The (actually illegal) payments to TSA workers, despite lapsed appropriations to the Department of Homeland Security, meant that metal detectors were running full-speed, and my flight was full.” (04/16/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Grant Stark
“Adding more generation capacity without hardening the last-mile delivery network leaves the cake half-baked.” [editor’s note: Relying on centralized generation and long-distance transmission is the problem – TLK] (04/16/26)
“Once again, as in Trump’s first term, the public and press are inattentive to the nation’s fiscal health relative to past years. But that reflects the president’s own disengagement with reconciling spending and revenue — this from a president many Americans voted for based on his purported prowess as a businessman. For decades back to Ronald Reagan’s time, so-called deficit wars in Washington were a big story. Now, even Republicans in Congress complain of Trump’s absence from the fiscal fray as they struggle to belatedly finish this year’s budget work that was due last fall, and to end a weeks-old partial government shutdown, before turning to the budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Yet it’s worth paying attention to U.S. budgets even if Trump won’t, for the sake of our children and grandchildren who’ll inherit the bills.” (04/16/26)
“This year marks the 90th anniversary of the beginning of modern macroeconomics with the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money on February 4, 1936. Few books have left such a mark on economic theory and, most certainly, on economic policy in so short a period of time.Ninety years after the appearance of The General Theory, many practical men of affairs and politicians in authority remain the slaves of defunct economists and academic scribblers.” (04/16/26)
“War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it’s been there from the beginning. After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World’s indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ in 1823, proclaiming the country’s exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial rape of Africa by America’s planter and merchant elites.” (04/16/26)
“Is it just me, or does it seem like Pope Leo XIV won’t stop talking about religion? He’s all ‘the Gospel says this’ and ‘Jesus taught us that’ – dude, we get it, you’re head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. But does that really make you an expert? As our Catholic Vice President JD Vance, who has a book coming out on his conversion to Catholicism, said, ‘I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.’ Exactly. Vance has been a Catholic since 2019, the year Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, so I’d take his warning seriously, Pope. He’s seven years deep into the Catholic faith – you don’t wanna mess with him. He’s part of the new Catholicism, the one that’s afraid to say ‘transubstantiation’ because it sounds woke and has ‘trans’ in it.” (04/15/26)
“Orbán’s loss doesn’t mean the authoritarian impulse is spent in Hungary or anywhere else. Magyar is a former Fidesz insider, and the system Orbán built doesn’t disappear the morning after an election. Brussels and the new Magyar government shouldn’t underestimate the resistance of the Orbán system and its entrenched members across government institutions. The Kremlin loses an important ally inside the EU. Ukraine may finally see Hungary’s veto on EU support lifted. These are real consequences worth acknowledging. All this said, the lesson here isn’t really about Hungary. It’s about what happens when a population finally gets tired of being told the looting is governance and the propaganda is journalism.” (04/15/26)
“Eric Swalwell was Nancy Pelosi’s made man, the golden child of San Francisco’s rotten machine politics. Today he’s roadkill, his name erased from the sign outside his congressional office, vultures feasting on his remains. Swalwell’s clinical political eradication this week tells you everything about the Democratic Party and how ruthlessly and efficiently it will move to keep power in the state it has controlled for 15 years and run into the ground.” (04/15/26)
“Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. … But some of the people demanding that Orban critics apologize don’t seem to just be mincing words. They seem to be implicitly denying the spectrum concept of democratic backsliding at all, arguing that if it’s possible to lose an election, past concerns must have been misplaced and retroactively embarrassing for the concern-holder.” (04/15/26)
