Can President Trump turn back the economic clock?

Historians make their names by convincing people to see patterns in chaos. In the late 1970s, French historian Fernand Braudel believed that one of these patterns would be about to repeat themselves. Braudel was a student of slowly moving currents that form events. He wanted people to seem less attention to great men like Napoleon and seemingly modest things like the potato, a new world importance that made it easier for European farmers to grow more food than they needed. This surplus in turn gave a broader selection of Europeans to get involved in new hobbies how to complain about their rulers. One could say that he regarded the potato as the cause of Napoleon.

In the third volume of his epic “civilization and capitalism” published in 1979, Braudel examined the forces that made a city at a time to the economic center of the western world from Venice via Amsterdam to London and then increased unstoppably in his place. He wrote that cities were upset as trade centers and then, when they gave them, invested their surpluses in the construction of new centers and technical. Commerce continued and left a financial center.

Braudel's account ended with the decline of Amsterdam, the deprepôt From Europe to the 17th and until the 18th century, a city with amazing wealth and diversity. Visitors with big eyes wrote about their miracles with the same atonement as later generations of New York. The young tsar of Russia was so impressed that he built St. Petersburg after his image. But when Amsterdam became fat and happy, his merchants became bankers and began to look for better returns in the rapidly growing London. Amsterdam, Brandel wrote, was “a company of reindeer investors looking for everything that would guarantee a calm and privileged life”, a society that “had drawn from the healthy tasks of economic life to the more demanding games of the money market.

Braudel noticed that London finally ceded his role and signed the rise of New York in the early 20th century. In the late 1970s, he assessed that New York entered the “autumn” of his time as the center of the global economy. Trade and industry fled from the city and left a flourishing financial center – a safe sign in Braudel's view that New York and the nation it was anchored were on the edge of the decline.

Donald Trump became Donald Trump in this city, built towers and bankruptcies casinos when the Wall Street boomed and the working class faded, and he appeared with a similarly bleak view of the prospects of America. His career as a political personality has built on his conviction that America loses his prosperity and power. When Ronald Reagan filled the voters with hope, Trump offers to keep her in her misery. He has an intuition for the things that fear people and conveniently say what other politicians are not. Where other presidents are still in America, Trump has touched a nerve by insisting that it does not last long before midnight.