Numerous online commenters are sharing the chart above, which shows that since Liberation day, manufacturing jobs have been declining, not growing. Note the scale; this isn’t a huge drop (~50k+ jobs out of over 12.5M), but it’s down–not up–and Mr. Trump promised all these manufacturing jobs (“we’re bringing them all back”). The question is why. […]

In what universe should the United States suggest a “peace plan” that gives Russia more Ukrainian territory than it has been able to win on the battlefield? Or that Ukraine, after being invaded repeatedly by a much larger Russia, should have the size of its armed forces limited? And that its security should be guaranteed […]

Since my last post was pretty gloomy for Republican-leaning voters, consider this comment from Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who continues to push a per employee tax on Chicago businesses, even after the city council’s finance committee soundly rejected it (from the WSJ): Yet Mr. Johnson is doubling down. “The corporate tax is in this budget. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I confess–this morning I feel like one of my students that’s just sitting down at the computer @ 11p.m. and they have a seven page paper due the next day, and they really don’t know know where to begin. My problem is I am really still struggling to process and understand some things that on […]

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 […]

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. […]

“Russia is never as strong, or as weak as she appears.” This quote, variations of it attributed to Otto Von Bismarck*, Winston Churchill and others, seems surely to be true. Putin himself put out a variation of it, “Russia was never so strong as it wants to be and never so weak as it is […]