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 Originally Posted by CoccoBill
My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the US agreed to stop military exercises with South Korea in exchange for a vague nuclear disarmament deal with no specifics. I'm not quite sure how peace in a meaningful sense is any closer. NK remains a hostile dictatorship with aims to develop nuclear weapons.
That is correct. If we see NK restart their previous norms of nuclear and icbm testing and if we see negotiations with SK, Japan, and US move backwards over a long period of time, then things will be back to where they were before Trump.
As the CNN article says, the caliphate is gone.
Than when? I'm assuming under Obama, who had to deal with the 2008 crisis. I think the whole world has been doing much better the past few years. Which exact policies do you think have most contributed to the US economy? For reference, here's some data. To me it seems like the upwards trend has been going on at the same pace at least since the 90s, and apart from the 2008 dip, it has continued through Obama's latter years in office. There is no change after Trump took office. Or were you thinking of a different metric?
Effects of policy can be seen over very short terms (theoretically they are often immediate). To be completely fair I compare from after the 2012 election to now.
The economy should always feel the same day to day, week to week, year to year -- all regardless of the real strength of the economy. This is an essential description of central banks' role. This sameness characterizes mostly both 2nd term Obama and 1st term Trump time periods, with probably Trump being slightly better but not that noticeably.
The economy feels about the same now as it did before Trump, as it should. The following nominal GDP graph shows what I'm talking about:
You may ask: if things feel the same doesn't that mean they are the same? The answer is only over the short term. Over the long term, it matters what about the feeling is real and what is inflation. Here I've broken down the nominal economy into its two components: inflation and real growth. As you can see, it matters where they are, but overall they're supposed to be managed such that they about the same.
But that's not the whole story. Notice how under Obama's 2nd term the federal funds rate (which drives the real interest rate) is subdued under Obama yet begins regular and frequent increases under Trump. This shows that the real economy is significantly stronger than the real GDP metric suggests.
Economists have two main ways of understanding what the behavior of the interest rate means, yet even though they are quite different they both suggest Obama's economy was less good than Trump's.
What's not in debate among economists and what is taught at every level of an economics education is decreasing the interest rate has an expansive impact on growth, and an increasing interest rate has a contracting impact on growth. As you can see this means that because the interest rate under Trump is increasing significantly more than it did under Obama, that it is probable that Trump's growth would be higher (by a lot) if he had Obama's interest rates.
Does that make sense? I haven't talked econ in a long ass time. Thanks for the prompt! :thumbsup
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