This article was translated by Bernardo Ferrero, from the original Italian. 

Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma has some advice for the US government: If the US is so concerned about industry and jobs, it should try starting fewer wars and spending trillions of dollars on them. Ma spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, saying:

Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s recent speech at Stanford University certainly was much like Ms. Yellen herself: predictable and safe. She is less opaque than Alan Greenspan, and less combative that Ben Bernanke. But she shares both men’s ability to say very little that is interesting or controversial.

The growth of US military power has rarely, if ever, been the result of legitimate concerns about defensive strategy, let alone about the national welfare. Instead, it’s more often a consequence of a waste, corruption, and imperial ambition that together have produced the modern military-industrial complex.

The world has come a long way since the heady days before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Technology, for one thing, has meant vast changes to our way of life and indeed to significant improvements in our economic productivity. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that these technological advances now make us depression-proof.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s recent speech at Stanford University certainly was much like Ms. Yellen herself: predictable and safe. She is less opaque than Alan Greenspan, and less combative that Ben Bernanke. But she shares both men’s ability to say very little that is interesting or controversial.

NPR featured an unintentionally funny piece this morning on Donald Trump’s views toward the EU and free trade. The guest, former US ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner, rightfully criticized the president’s view that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” and called for continued global engagement by US companies and consumers. But he revealed, perhaps inadvertently, what political actors mean by “free trade.”  

Mainstream media are worried about 2017 shocks. So they should be. If you had gambled a pound (or euro) this time last year on a triple accumulator; Leicester City to be English football champions, Brexit, and then Trump, you would have redeemed your betting slip for a million.

The US government’s efforts against illicit drugs have finally run their course. With over one trillion dollars wasted over the past several decades and nothing to show but failure, taxpayers are beginning to ask a simple yet pertinent question: Is it time to end the bottomless funding of this utterly ineffective anti-drug crusade?

The Spanish banking sector is getting used to judicial setbacks. Unfortunately, they’re not the sorts of setbacks we’d like to see. This could have been an article on the elimination of the legal privileges — e.g., the existence of a state-owned central bank in charge of bailing out its (equally) irresponsible fellows — that financial businesses are nowadays granted worldwide. Eliminating those privileges would have been a setback for the banking sector, but good for everyone else.