Mr. Trump has boldly gone where no previous president has dared to go. For almost 50 years, the Iranian regime has engaged in low-level warfare against both the U.S. and its allies. Over 2000 Americans have been killed by Iranian proxies, and our response has been typically, at best, tit for tat. Given the ideological […]
Archives
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Mr. Trump and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Maybe he should move to Australia?
23 Feb 2026
Friday, was not kind to Mr. Trump, but Adam Smith will have his day. And so will our Founding Fathers. As we predicted, Mr. Trump’s tariff’s did not pass legal muster at the Supreme Court, just as they did not in the lower court processes. His preferred path was to use the International Emergency Economic […]
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The big news of the last week was the Trump Administration’s backtrack of his not-so implicit threat to take over Greenland by force. It’s of course not surprising that he backed off, as there is not American support to even buy Greenland, much less take it over by force. Further, his proposed tariff increases were […]
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Mr. Trump’s failed political entrepreneurship. Why Trump 2.0 appears that peak Trump has passed.
22 Nov 2025
A big focus area for me in my day job as dean of the business school is to prepare our students for leadership in the market. This includes a large focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. One of the key lessons we push early on is the idea of listening to the market, following Eric Reis’s […]
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Dealing with Mr. Trump. “Suck Up or Shut Up?”
18 Nov 2025
So reads a headline in The Economist magazine in discussing how CEOs of major corporations have to deal with Donald Trump. Mr. Trump, notorious of wanting adulation, demands supplicants give laudatory remarks about him to gain or stay in his good graces. This morning I read in the WSJ an op-ed by Kevin Warsh on […]
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Adam Smith 5, Donald Trump Zero: Trump forced to pull tariffs back due to affordability concerns
16 Nov 2025
As we predicted here at BATG, consumers feeling the pressure of higher prices related to tariffs are expressing significant disillusionment with Mr. Trump’s economic policies. And as we talked about last week, the election results resonated with concerns over affordability. Even many conservative commentators are warning Mr. Trump to stop trying to tell people that […]
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First up is the results of off cycle elections last week. In short, they are are warning to Mr. Trump and the Republicans. While the outcomes were not surprising (as NJ and VA are very blue) the magnitude of the victory was quite a statement. For sure the government shutdown helped pad the margins in […]
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Ever since the Fall, humans constantly compare ourselves to others. Now that we are “naked and ashamed” and have to cover ourselves with fig leaves, we compare ourselves to others almost constantly. If we’re “better” than those we compare to (in some sense) we feel prideful. If we are inferior, we feel shame or envy. […]
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A Trumpian Triumph challenges the left
14 Oct 2025
The release of the Israeli hostages filled most of the world with joy yesterday. The end of the war in Israel is now possible. War is ugly, which is why however unrealistic its vision is in a fallen world, we must always at our core desire to be peacemakers. Phase 1 of this peace deal […]
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Mr. Trump repeatedly insists there is no inflation for his rationale for berating the Fed for not lowering interest rates, and yet the dollar has fallen ~9% since the beginning of the year. And Gold is up ~40% since his inauguration. Gold is an inflation hedge, and you can be sure, the market is pricing […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach