CEFA-Mitarbeiter
Jag DeSaint
Executive Director, The Cefa Brief, CEFA, CEFA
Executive Director of The Cefa Brief.
Foto: The Cefa Brief
Biografie
Jag DeSaint is the Executive Director of The Cefa Brief, the Center for Economics & Foreign Affairs' publication of signed commentary and analysis. He writes on industrial capacity, development finance and the economics of foreign policy.
Sprachen: Englisch
Bücher von Jag DeSaint
The PrincipleThe Silent Architecture of Authority
&Think Publishing · 2026
A ruthless examination of how power operates beneath the visible language of politics, institutions, loyalty, fear, legitimacy, succession, and control. This is not power as advertised. This is power as practiced. Across history, authority has rarely belonged to the loudest figure, the most virtuous figure, or even the figure whose title appears most prominently on the door.
The Monetary StateMonetary Statecraft & the Architecture of Financial Power
&Think Publishing · 2026
Money fails first as a delay. A payment marked complete stays reversible. A clearing window extends. A margin call arrives early. A corridor tightens documentation and turns routine into exception. In that moment, the argument returns, and the hierarchy hidden in calm becomes visible as behavior. The Monetary State begins there. It treats money not as a symbol or a policy dial, but as a governed architecture of claims, ledgers, collateral, and finality that decides what counts as real when time becomes scarce.
The MarketThe Machinery of Capital
&Think Publishing · 2026
Markets are usually explained with stories about fear and greed, innovation and disruption, boom and bust. Those stories are not false, but they are not the machine. The machine is rule, record, proof, and timing: who is allowed to see first, who is allowed to settle first, whose mark becomes official, whose correction becomes law, whose dispute is resolved quickly, and whose uncertainty is priced as a permanent penalty. The market does not only price assets. It prices time, and in stress, time becomes the most valuable product of all.
Empire BornMother of God
&Think Publishing · 2026
In September 1592, the river looks harmless. Gray water, low sky, the kind of day that makes men believe the world is small. Then a battered Portuguese carrack drifts in, forced by weather and pursuit, her hull scarred, her rigging sagging, her decks crowded with exhausted hands who know they are outnumbered. Her name is Madre de Deus. The name hits the tongue like a prayer. The ship answers like a confession.
TechnomicsThe Silent War
&Think Publishing · 2026
Power no longer operates mainly through force, ideology, or visible authority. In the modern world, power works through systems—technological, economic, and financial structures that shape behavior before choices are ever consciously made. These systems do not announce themselves as instruments of control. They present as neutral, efficient, and inevitable, guiding outcomes quietly while leaving the appearance of freedom intact. Power is exercised not by issuing orders, but by shaping the environment in which decisions occur.
The StatesmanThe Art of Dominion
&Think Publishing · 2025
A Codex for the Architects of Power: A ruthless manifesto of dominance, strategy, and calculated control—where power is neither given nor negotiated, but constructed, wielded, and expanded until all opposition is extinguished. The ruthless art of power is not for the weak. This book is a weapon, a masterstroke of calculated dominance, exposing the brutal truths of control, strategy, and manipulation that have defined history’s most formidable rulers, conquerors, and tacticians.
Beiträge von Jag DeSaint
120 Beiträge
- BefundIndustrial Policy
Core capital-goods orders took three years to return to their 2022 figure
The monthly average rose from 62 billion dollars in 2020 to 77 in 2022, then ran 75, 74 and back to 77. The figure counts dollars and is not adjusted for prices, so a return to the same number is not a return to the same order book.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarEnergy & Power
Interconnection queues are a pricing failure, and faster studies will not clear them
The charge a project faces for connecting to the grid cannot be known when the decision to build is made, because it depends on which other applications are studied first, and a charge settled that way is a draw rather than a price. No series in this brief measures a queue, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the priced parts of the system already show.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarDevelopment Finance
A development institution should give up the senior position and hold the first loss
The United States ran a current account deficit in every year from 2020 to 2025, averaging 147 billion dollars a quarter at the start of that window and 294 at the end, exactly twice as wide. An institution that gives up the senior position will report a smaller book and a worse loss record, and both are the point.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarIndustrial Policy
The order book everyone quotes is measured in dollars that changed size
New orders for durable goods reached 311.2 billion dollars in 2025, the highest reading in five years. It is a current-dollar figure stated as a monthly rate, and it is routinely read as neither of those things.
Von Jag DeSaint
- PerspektiveDevelopment Finance
Financial depth changes what capital costs and not what a country is able to build
The policy rate moved 4.94 points between 2021 and 2023 and the thirty-year mortgage rate moved 3.85 over the same two years, which is what a deep system does. Across the same window manufacturing output stayed below its 2017 base in every reading.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundIndustrial Policy
Research spending has no down year, and its largest annual addition was in 2022
The quarterly average rose from 754 billion dollars in 2020 to 1,081 billion in 2025, 327 billion higher across five steps. The largest of those steps, 103 billion, came in 2022, and the three years since have added 139 billion between them.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
Four fifths of the rise in new business applications since 2020 came in a single year
The weekly average went from 84 thousand applications in 2020 to 104 thousand in 2021, and the four years since have added five. The 2025 reading of 109 thousand is the highest of the six, and also the third rise in a series that has fallen in the year between each one.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
The debt ratio fell for three years while the debt itself rose in every year the series records
Federal debt as a share of GDP fell from 122.3 percent in 2020 to 117.7 in 2023, then turned and reached 120.7 in 2025. The debt rose in every year the same file records, so what fell in those three years was the ratio and not the obligation.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarInfrastructure
The permit counts say permitting is not the binding constraint on American delivery
Housing units authorised by permit fell in each of the four years to 2025, from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units to 1431, while spending on manufacturing plant rose from an annual rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024. Neither series records a waiting time, so neither can show a queue; plant spending fell 29 billion in 2025, the year the policy rate came down.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarDevelopment Finance
Mobilised volume is the wrong test of a development finance institution
Mobilised volume counts the private dollars that closed alongside a public commitment, and it can be audited on the day the deal signs. Additionality asks whether those dollars would have moved anyway, which nobody can observe, and an institution that adopts the harder standard will report a smaller number for more difficult work.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundHousing & Urban Development
Two years of decline have taken the mortgage rate 0.21 points off its peak
The thirty-year fixed rate peaked at 6.81 per cent in 2023, and the two annual readings since are 6.72 and 6.6. The federal funds rate ended those same two years 0.81 points lower, nearly four times as far, though it rose before it fell.
Von Jag DeSaint
- PerspektiveRegional Development
The occupation that concentrates pays above its local median in every jurisdiction, and the occupation that spreads pays above it in ten
Computer and mathematical work pays more than the middle job in all fifty-one jurisdictions; production work does so in ten, six of which hold the country's lowest median wages. Production is also the more evenly spread of the two, at or above the national share in 27 jurisdictions against 13.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundWorkforce & Skills
The largest fall in job openings came in the year unemployment was lowest
Openings peaked at 11.2 million on the monthly average in 2022 and have fallen in each of the three years since, by 1.9 million, then 1.6 million, then 0.6 million. The largest of those falls landed in 2023, when the unemployment rate read 3.6 percent, the lowest of its six readings, and the smallest landed in 2025, when the rate read 4.3 percent.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarDevelopment Finance
Adaptation keeps losing to mitigation because an avoided loss is not a cash flow
The ten-year Treasury averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and at those rates a dollar of avoided damage arriving in thirty years is worth 76.7 cents and 28.4 cents. Turning that dollar into a cash flow needs a named obligor, and the party that funds a defence is rarely the party whose balance sheet it repairs.
Von Jag DeSaint
- PerspektiveIndustrial Policy
What an allocator actually learns from four flat years of industrial output
Industrial production has spent five straight readings within 1.2 points of its 2017 base. That flat line is not evidence that nothing is being built. It is evidence that the aggregate cannot answer the question capital is asking.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
Average hourly earnings rose in every year of the window, and the price level rose by slightly more
Private-sector pay went from 29.36 dollars an hour in 2020 to 36.44 in 2025, a gain of 7.08 dollars with no down year. Restated at 2020 prices using the consumer price index, the 2025 figure is 29.30 dollars, about six cents below where the series started.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarRegional Development
A house price index is not a house price
Maine's house price index stands at 1044.11 and California's at 974.97. Each state's index is anchored at 100 in the first quarter of 1980, which means the ranking measures appreciation since then and says nothing at all about what a house costs.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarMacroeconomics & Markets
Six productivity readings cannot carry the case being made for artificial intelligence
Output per hour in the nonfarm business sector went from 109.1 in 2020 to 118 in 2025 on a 2017 base of 100, and the largest single step in that window, 3.3 points, landed in 2024 rather than 2025. The two fastest years for the ratio are also the two slowest years for payrolls, which is the shape a shrinking denominator makes as well as the shape a new technology makes.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarEnergy & Power
Every infrastructure plan assumes a maintenance workforce it never budgets
Adding up the 51 state estimates gives 6,086,200 people in installation, maintenance and repair. In 50 of those 51 jurisdictions they are paid above the state median wage. A capital programme that treats them as someone else's problem is buying an asset it has not costed to run.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
The deficit widened most in the year the debt ratio was lowest
Into 2023 the deficit widened by 313 billion dollars, the largest single-year widening in the window, and federal debt that year stood at 117.7 per cent of GDP, the lowest of its own six readings. Across the five year-on-year moves the two series ran in the same direction three times and in opposite directions twice.
Von Jag DeSaint
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