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
- KommentarRural Economies
Rural broadband went wrong at handover, not at appropriation, and the agency that signed the award should carry the account
The money bought construction, and construction is not a connection: a rural household needs a line that works, at a price it will pay, kept working after the crews have gone. No series in this brief measures a broadband award, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the wage and price data show about the interval between the money and the work.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarIndustrial Policy
The bigger GDP number answers a different question
The United States publishes two gross domestic product totals and they are diverging by design. Industrial programmes are almost always defended with the larger one, which is the only one that cannot tell you whether more is being made.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
The dollar index gained 7.6 points in one year and 2.0 in the three that followed
The broad index fell to 113.1 in 2021, rose to 120.7 in 2022, and has since read 120.3, 122.9 and 122.7. Each annual point is the average of that year's observations, so a flat line between two years does not establish a quiet year inside either of them.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundIndustrial Policy
Manufacturing output has been below its 2017 level in every year since 2020
The manufacturing index read 93 on a 2017 base of 100 in 2020 and 97.3 in 2025, with a high of 98 in 2022. Total industrial production, on the same base and from the same board, crossed 100 in 2022 and has stayed above it, and the distance between the two lines has widened at every step since 2021.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundWorkforce & Skills
The states most crowded with construction workers are mostly drilling and mining
Ranked by construction and extraction jobs per thousand, the top of the table is Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska. Their own occupational detail shows what is doing the work in that ranking, and it is not building.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundIndustrial Policy
Half the capacity use gained after 2020 has since been given back
Manufacturing capacity utilisation rose 4.7 points between 2020 and 2022, and 4.4 of them arrived in the first year. It has given back 2.3 points in the three years since.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundEconomic Security
The consumer price index has not fallen in a single year since 2020
Prices rose more slowly after 2022, and the index kept rising anyway. It stands at 322 against 258.9 five years earlier, a level about 24 percent higher.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarStrategic Technology
An export control can close a sale and it cannot close a dependency
Goods imports from China averaged 45 billion dollars a month in 2022 and 26 billion a month in 2025, and goods exports to mainland China fell to 9 billion a month, the lowest of six readings. Over the same years the balance in goods and services widened from minus 75 billion a month to minus 78, the widest of its own six.
Von Jag DeSaint
- PerspektiveInfrastructure
Shovel-ready is a wage question before it is a permitting one
Texas and California employ almost exactly the same number of construction and extraction workers. The median wage in one is 49,170 dollars and in the other 71,670. A national cost per mile that ignores that is not a cost estimate.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarIndustrial Policy
One industrial line is climbing and the index around it is not
Domestic semiconductor production reached 165 on a 2017 base in 2025, from 121 in 2021. Total industrial production reached 101.2. That gap is the best evidence economic-security policy has in this data, which is exactly why it should be claimed carefully.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarTrade & Investment
Trade policy built for containers is missing a trillion dollars of exports
Services exports run at $1.2 trillion on the Bureau of Economic Analysis measure. Tariff schedules, rules of origin and customs lines cannot see them, which means neither the protection nor the retaliation lands where a growing part of the exposure sits.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundEconomic Security
Real output per person rose again in 2025, by less than in any earlier year of the window
Output per person has risen at every reading, from 61,127 chained 2017 dollars in 2020 to 69,749 in 2025, but the step into 2025 is 1,068 dollars and it is the smallest of the five. The total the figure is drawn from slowed in the same year, adding 0.49 trillion dollars against 0.64 in each of the two years before it, so the flatter step is not a story about population alone.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarInfrastructure
The ten-year Treasury has done more to infrastructure than any permit reform
In 2020 a thirty-year asset was discounted against a long rate of 0.89 percent. In 2025 the same asset is discounted against 4.29. No procedural reform on the table is worth as much as that one line, and almost nobody appraising a project talks about it.
Von Jag DeSaint
- PerspektiveFiscal Policy
Ohio levies a corporate income tax and collected 176 thousand dollars from it
In the FY2025 collections file the corporate income tax runs from 32.9 percent of New Hampshire's state taxes to effectively nothing in Ohio, and four states have no such levy at all. The share is a poor guide to how a state treats capital, and it is used as a good one.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarInfrastructure
Local infrastructure is limited by the people who can run a project, not by the price of money
The ten-year Treasury rose from 0.89 percent in 2020 to 4.29 in 2025 and nonresidential construction spending rose alongside it, from 856 billion dollars a year to 1,309. What complicates the argument is that the only capacity measure held here counts business and financial operations workers across every industry, not the staff of any city hall.
Von Jag DeSaint
- KommentarTrade & Investment
A tariff is borne at home, and the published data closes two of the three answers that say otherwise
Goods imports from China fell from a monthly average of 45 billion dollars in 2022 to 26 in 2025, while imports of goods and services rose from 3.97 trillion to 4.25, so the buying moved rather than came home. No series on this site measures a duty collected or an import price, so whether the exporter cut his own price cannot be tested here at all.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundMacroeconomics & Markets
The low point of this vehicle sales window is 2022, not 2020
The annual rate ran 14.9 million units in 2020, rose to 15.4 in 2021, then fell to 14.2 in 2022, the lowest of the six readings. Three quarters of the recovery since arrived in a single step, and the two years after it added 0.3 million units each.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundInfrastructure
Nonresidential construction spending rose 14 billion in 2025 after 450 in three years
The annual rate stands at 1,309 billion dollars, the highest of six readings, and the step that brought it there is the smallest rise in the series. Spending on manufacturing plant fell 29 billion in the same year, so a total that barely moved sits on top of a 43-billion rise in everything else.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundInfrastructure
The ten-year yield has risen in every year since 2020
Six annual observations, five changes, and not one of them negative. In the year the overnight policy rate fell 0.93 points, the ten-year rose again.
Von Jag DeSaint
- BefundTrade & Investment
Goods imports from China fell 11 billion dollars a month in 2025, taking the series below its 2020 level
The monthly average rose from 36 billion dollars in 2020 to 45 in 2022, then fell to 26 in 2025, the lowest of the six readings. Exports in the other direction also ended at their lowest reading, so the narrower bilateral difference comes from buying less rather than selling more.
Von Jag DeSaint
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