Equipo de CEFA
Jag DeSaint
Executive Director, The Cefa Brief, CEFA, CEFA
Executive Director of The Cefa Brief.
Foto: The Cefa Brief
Biografía
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.
Idiomas: inglés
Libros de 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.
Piezas de Jag DeSaint
120 piezas
- HallazgoIndustrial Policy
Electronics output rose more in 2025 than in the three years before it combined
The computer and electronic product index added 8.5 points in 2025, against 8 points exactly across the three preceding years together, on a base where 2017 is 100. A narrower semiconductor index published on the same base added 21 points in that same year, and the file does not say how much of the broader move belongs to it.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioEconomic Security
Before the next plant, explain the idle line
American manufacturing used 75.3 percent of its capacity in 2025, against 77.6 percent in 2022. A programme that pays to add capacity without accounting for the capacity already standing is not an industrial policy. It is a construction policy.
Por Jag DeSaint
- PerspectivaIndustrial Policy
What transfers between places is the method, not the programme
Spending on manufacturing plant rose from 75 billion dollars a year to 244 and then fell to 215, and no file held here says where a dollar of it landed. The structures that decide whether such spending works are published state by state, but nothing here records a single award, decision or outcome.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioEconomic Security
The import bill is an input cost, not a scoreboard
The United States imported $4.25 trillion of goods and services in 2025. Reading that total as a loss column is what makes a broad tariff look like a collection from abroad rather than a tax on American production.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioIndustrial Policy
Industrial policy is being judged by the wrong labour number
The unemployment rate says how many job-seekers found work. It says nothing about how many people are looking. For a programme meant to draw people back into work, that is the only question that matters.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoHousing & Urban Development
Housing units authorised by permit fell in every year after 2021 and are now below their 2020 reading
The series peaked at a monthly average of 1734 thousand units in 2021 and has come down in each of the four years since, to 1431 in 2025. The thirty-year mortgage rate reached its own high in 2023 and has eased in the two years since, and authorisations fell in both of them.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioTrade & Investment
A trade agreement is worth the terms it fixes and not the exports it is credited with
Exports of goods and services rose at every step from 2021 to 2025, from 2.57 trillion dollars to 3.32, and any instrument in force across those years can be credited with a line that was rising regardless. The same window also prices what an agreement actually sells: the broad dollar index moved 8.7 percent between the low and high of six annual averages, and nobody negotiated that.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioMultilateral Institutions
Sovereign restructuring was built for a world where delay cost the creditor nothing
Reprofiling worked because a payment pushed out ten years cost the creditor nothing in real terms, and in 2020 the implied real ten-year yield was minus 0.60 percent. In 2025 it was plus 1.96 percent, so the same extension now costs a real 17.6 percent, and a process whose only enforcement is peer pressure has to arrange that loss.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioCapital Markets
A country should build its export credit agency for speed, because it does not set the terms
The base an export credit is priced against moved 3.40 points on the ten-year Treasury between 2020 and 2025, and the policy rate moved 3.34 points from one year to the next. Those are larger than any margin an agency concedes, which leaves the signing date as the one term it owns, and a fast agency is worth having only if it can also refuse quickly.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoMacroeconomics & Markets
Producer prices fell in two straight years and are still below the 2022 peak
The all-commodities producer price index reached 264.5 in 2022, fell twice, and at 260.3 in 2025 has not regained it. It also sits 65.9 points above 2020.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoEconomic Security
Federal debt rises every year but the annual addition has no trend
The stock goes from 28.7 to 37.1 trillion dollars across five observations. The four annual additions behind that run 2.1, 1.9, 2.6 and 1.8 trillion, and the most recent is the smallest of them.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoWorkforce & Skills
The fall in unemployment was finished by 2022, and the rate has risen since
The rate dropped from 8.1 percent in 2020 to 3.7 in 2022, reached a low of 3.6 in 2023, and has risen in both readings since, to 4.3.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoIndustrial Policy
Factory construction spending fell in 2025 after four straight years of increase
The monthly average rose from 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 billion in 2024, then fell to 215 billion in 2025, the only fall in six readings. Nonresidential construction spending, from the same agency and on the same basis, rose in that same year.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioInfrastructure
Three flat years of housing starts is a result, not a pause
Starts have run at 1.42, 1.37 and 1.36 million units since 2023, below where the window opened in 2020. The dollars going into construction rose through the same period, and the dollars are what gets quoted.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoEconomic Security
The industrial index has spent six years going almost nowhere
Industrial production ended 2025 at 101.2 on a 2017 base of 100. It has moved 1.9 points in four years, and the 2025 reading sits 0.2 above 2022.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoEconomic Security
American payrolls keep growing, and each year adds less than the one before
Total nonfarm payrolls rose in every annual reading from 2020 to 2025. The size of the rise has fallen three years running, from 6.2 million jobs to 700,000.
Por Jag DeSaint
- HallazgoEconomic Security
Retail sales rose in every year of the window, counted in dollars
The monthly rate went from 601.2 billion dollars in 2021 to 724.4 in 2025 with no down year. The largest single-year rise landed in the same year as the largest rise in the price level.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioEconomic Security
An economy that exports eleven percent of its output is hard to coerce
The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts exports at 11 percent of GDP. That number disappoints anyone who wants trade to be the growth engine and reassures anyone who thinks a trade fight is cheap. Both readings make the same mistake about what an average is.
Por Jag DeSaint
- PerspectivaLabor Markets
Healthcare employs more people at higher median pay than production work, which does not mean a transition has held anywhere
Summed across the fifty-one jurisdictions in the 2025 occupational file, healthcare practitioners outnumber production workers by 1,258,080, and in all fifty-one the practitioner median wage is the higher of the two. The jurisdiction most concentrated in that work has the third-lowest median wage of the fifty-one.
Por Jag DeSaint
- ComentarioRegional Development
Six states raise no income tax and no two replace it the same way
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming levy no individual income tax. The FY2025 collections file shows what each one leans on instead, and the answer is narrower and less uniform than the shorthand suggests.
Por Jag DeSaint
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