(1) Checkmate: The Economic Chess Masters Play a Losing Game (National Review)

“The nature of our technologically enabled present global connectedness means that for the first time in human history all economic activity happens in immediate relation to everything else. You cannot isolate the variables, which is a real problem if you believe in political management of the economy and see the policy question as nothing more than a really tough math problem.”

(2) U.S. Export-Import Bank: From Apple Pie to Endangered Species (Bloomberg)

“Though Democrats widely support Ex-Im, Barack Obama criticized it while campaigning for president in 2008, calling it “little more than a fund for corporate welfare” at a time when opposition to government spending, triggered by the bailouts that year, was growing.”

(3) Ex-Im inaction prompts GE moves (CT Post)

(4) Pelosi ‘Very Excited’ about the Republicans’ Attempt to Revive Ex-Im (National Review)

(5) A quote from Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg:

“Gerald Swope, the president of GE, provides a perfect illustration of the business elite’s economic worldview. A year before FDR took office, he published his modestly titled The Swope Plan. His idea was that the government would agree to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could collude in order to adjust “production to consumption.” Industry would “no longer operate in independent units, but as a whole, according to rules laid out by a trade association…the whole supervised by some federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission.” Under Swopism, as many in and out of government called it, the state would remove the uncertainty for the big-business man so that he could “go forward decisively instead of fearsomely.”