CEFA 员工
Jag DeSaint
Executive Director, The Cefa Brief, CEFA, CEFA
Executive Director of The Cefa Brief.
图片：The Cefa Brief
简介
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.
语言：英语
Jag DeSaint 的著作
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.
120 篇稿件
- 视角Industrial Policy
Regulation can change what an asset does; only ownership decides that it exists
Ownership gives a state two rights no rule confers: the decision that an asset exists, and the claim on whatever is left over once it does. What complicates the case is price, because the ten-year Treasury rate averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and a state that owns must raise the money before it decides anything.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 洞察Economic Security
Two thirds of the M2 increase since 2020 arrived in a single year
The money stock is 4.26 trillion dollars larger than in 2020. Of that, 2.84 trillion came between 2020 and 2021, and the four years since have added half as much again, including the only contraction in the window.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Economic Security
Commodity dependence is an exposure in the budget, and the conversion that ends it runs slower than the price cycle
Texas raises more severance tax than any other state, 8.00 billion dollars, and that is 8.9 percent of what Texas collects; the same tax is 47.2 percent of North Dakota's. The exposure therefore sits in the size of the rest of the base, and the spending that would widen one moves slowly: factory construction rose for four years, then fell.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Strategic Technology
Technical standards decide admission where a tariff only sets a price, and nothing in the record counts admission
Goods exports to mainland China fell from 13 billion dollars a month in 2022 to 9 in 2025, and imports from 45 to 26. The series record that both legs shrank and attribute the fall to nothing, which is why a rulebook written years earlier cannot be told apart from a duty imposed last quarter.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Industrial Policy
Institutional quality is several separable capacities, and the score that ranks them is mostly a choice of weights
Operationally the term names separable things: a task specified, a cost stated, a time stated, and a published record of whether the work was done. A composite removes the units before it adds them, and on this site's own state index the weightings a person could defend move one jurisdiction across thirty places.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Tariffs & Trade Agreements
A bilateral arrangement locks in a counterparty, which is the part of a trading position most likely to change
Goods imports from China fell from a monthly average of 45 billion dollars in 2022 to 26 in 2025, and exports to it from 13 to 9, while total imports and exports of goods and services each rose by 0.28 trillion dollars across the same three years. No series on this site describes an arrangement of either kind, so what each locks in is argued here and not measured.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 评论Workforce & Skills
A national credential is built for a job market no state actually has
The Bureau's 2025 occupational file lists twelve local specialities for each of 51 jurisdictions, 612 rows holding 351 different occupations, and 204 of those appear on exactly one state's list. The same file records no credential at all, so an employer certificate would have to publish numbers a stranger can count before it could replace the system it criticises.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Industrial Policy
Industrial strategy is a decade-long commitment made by institutions that are not built to hold one
Spending on manufacturing plant rose from a yearly rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024, lifting the factory share of all nonresidential building from 8.8 percent to 18.8. Manufacturing employment reached its high for these six years in 2023 and is lower now, which is what it looks like when a country can order buildings faster than the institutions to run them.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Governance & Institutions
Reform of a multilateral institution changes behaviour only when it changes what the institution must count
Reform is argued as a question of votes and chairs, while behaviour is set by the balance sheet, the appropriation and the measure that decides eligibility. The statistics that would test any of it are national, and this site holds no comparable published series for the institutions themselves.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 洞察Economic Security
The policy rate has given back less than a fifth of its climb
On annual averages the federal funds rate rose 5.06 percentage points from its 2021 low to its 2024 peak, then fell 0.93. Everything priced against the policy rate is still being priced against most of the increase.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 洞察Infrastructure
Each yearly fall in housing starts has been smaller than the one before it
The starts rate has declined in four consecutive observations, but the declines are shrinking: 0.05, then 0.13, then 0.05, then 0.01. The last of those is one unit in the final published digit, which means the series has stopped moving at a level below where it began in 2020.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Industrial Policy
Ten of fifty-one jurisdictions are concentrated in both production and engineering work, and the record cannot show a cluster forming in any of them
Twenty-five jurisdictions employ production workers more intensively than the nation and twenty-three do the same for architecture and engineering, but only ten do both. The rate at which people quit a job, which is the closest thing the record holds to the movement a cluster runs on, gave its lowest reading of the window in 2025.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 评论Housing Supply
Federal policy cannot raise housing supply and should pay for authorisations instead
Idaho authorised 0.98 new private housing units per thousand residents in July 2026 and California 0.21, a ratio of 4.66, under the same federal tax code and the same policy rate. Idaho's house-price index has still multiplied 8.78 times since 1980 against California's 9.75, so authorising more has not by itself held appreciation down.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Strategic Technology
Diffusion rather than invention is the binding step in technological change, and no series in the record counts it
Computer and electronic product output rose 21.1 index points between 2020 and 2025 while manufacturing output as a whole ended 2.7 points below its own 2017 base. Core capital-goods orders, the closest series in the record to the channel by which equipment reaches firms that do not make it, averaged 77 billion dollars a month in 2022 and the same in 2025.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Macroeconomics & Markets
Two participation rates moved apart, and that gap is where ageing would enter the arithmetic
Headline participation gained 0.7 points between 2020 and 2025 while participation inside the 25-54 band gained 2.2, and the two rates divide by different populations. That gap is the shape an ageing population would take in a labour statistic, but none of these series counts anybody's age, so the shape is all it is.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Economic Security
A supply chain is governed on private books, and the public statistics reach only its edges
American business held an average of 2,663 billion dollars of inventory across 2025, 35.1 percent above 2020, and that buffer is the working instrument of resilience. The series records its size and nothing else: not who holds it, not against which supplier, not where the next tier sits.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 洞察Economic Security
Nearly two thirds of the five-year export gain arrived in a single year
Exports of goods and services rose 0.47 trillion dollars in 2022 and then 0.03, 0.15 and 0.10. A series that never falls looks like steady growth until you write it as steps, at which point it looks like one event followed by three quiet years.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 视角Industrial Policy
Each instrument of economic statecraft has its own published series and the doctrine meant to rank them has none
Construction spending on manufacturing plant ran at 75 billion dollars a year in 2020 and 215 in 2025, while manufacturing output on a 2017 base of 100 ended the window at 97.3. Every instrument of statecraft has a published series, and the ranking that says which instrument yields when two collide has none.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 评论Migration & Demography
The labour-force series do not record who arrived, and participation is not a substitute
No file on this site records a worker's place of birth, so nothing here can attribute a share of recent capacity to migration. The rate usually offered as a stand-in fell 0.2 points between 2023 and 2025 while prime-age participation rose 0.3 points to its six-year high of 83.6 percent, a divergence the two different populations can produce with nobody arriving at all.
作者：Jag DeSaint
- 洞察Trade & Investment
Goods exports to mainland China are lower in 2025 than in 2020
The monthly average rose to 13 billion dollars in 2021, stayed between 12 and 13 for four years, then fell to 9 in 2025, the lowest of the six readings. Imports from China fell further in the same year, so the gap between the two series is at its narrowest while exports are at their weakest.
作者：Jag DeSaint
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