USMCA: New Name, Same Ole NAFTA; Kavanaugh Probe Day 1; Global De-Dollarization

On this episode of The Critical Hour, Dr. Wilmer Leon is joined by Dr. Jack Rasmus, professor of economics at Saint Mary's College of California and author of Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression, who also writes at jackrasmus.com.

President Donald Trump likes the new trade deal between the US and Canada. In a series of tweets this morning, Trump said the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement "is a great deal for all three countries, solves the many deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA and greatly opens markets to our farmers and manufacturers … it reduces trade barriers to the US and will bring all three great nations together in competition with the rest of the world. The USMCA is a historic transaction!" Economist Dr. Jack Rasmus' latest Op-Ed, "Mexico-US-Canada NAFTA Trade Agreement Reached – Trump’s Phony Trade War Confirmed," argues, "Trump has been playing his ‘economic nationalism’ card that helped win him his election once again ...Trump will now exaggerate and lie about both deals to his domestic political base, but the terms of both the Mexican and Canadian trade deals will show hardly any change.” What’s really going on here?

As I said last Friday, it was quite a day in the US Senate. More specifically, it was quite a day inside one elevator in the US Senate. Just as Senators Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, and Orrin Hatch were about to take their victory lap, Senator Jeff Flake got cornered by two women whose personal stories rocked him to his socks. With that, Flake agreed to vote for Kavanaugh on the Senate Judiciary Committee but said he would not be comfortable voting for final confirmation on the floor of the Senate without giving the FBI a week to investigate. So, the FBI is investigating, but I’m not clear on what this really entails, and is it really an investigation that will produce any substantive information?

"The Trump administration’s bellicosity has combined with the volatility of the global economy to sharply accelerate what has become an international movement: ditching the dollar as the world’s reserve currency," writes Jon Jeter in a recent MintPress op-ed. But what does this mean going forward? We'll explore his hypothesis and examine if this is leading the US towards another economic crisis.