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Donald Trump has tapped Stephen Miran, an economist who served during his first term, to chair his Council of Economic Advisers.

With the nomination, the president-elect is seeking to elevate to a White House economic post not only a critic of Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell but one who has accused the Biden administration of manipulating the economy and “usurping” the central bank’s role.

“Steve will work with the rest of my Economic Team to deliver a Great Economic Boom that lifts up all Americans,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday.

Miran was a senior adviser for economic policy at the Treasury department in the first Trump administration.

Currently a senior strategist at hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital Management, he said he was honoured. “I look forward to working to help implement the President’s policy agenda to create a booming, noninflationary economy that brings prosperity to all Americans!” he posted on X.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers is a three-person group that advises the president on economic policy.

Trump has threatened US trading partners, vowing to impose sweeping tariffs, including 25 per cent levies on goods from Mexico and Canada and 10 per cent on China’s imports, on his first day in office.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to impose blanket levies of 20 per cent on all US imports, as well as tariffs of 60 per cent on those from China, suggesting his second-term policies could be more protectionist and disruptive to the global economy and markets than his first.

The president-elect has also pledged to renew tax cuts he enacted during his first spell in the White House.

Earlier this year, Miran co-wrote a paper accusing Biden’s Treasury department of manipulating the economy during the election, arguing the government’s dependence on short-term debt amounted to “stealth quantitative easing and impedes the Fed’s ability to fight inflation.

“By adjusting the maturity profile of its debt issuance, Treasury is dynamically managing financial conditions and, through them, the economy, usurping core functions of the Federal Reserve”, he wrote with economist Nouriel Roubini.

“We dub this novel tool ‘activist Treasury issuance,’ or ATI. By manipulating the amount of interest-rate risk owned by investors, ATI works through the same channels as the Fed’s quantitative easing programs.”

In FT Alphaville last year, Miran co-authored a piece warning against the perils of a two-tier bond market, which “would impair Treasuries’ ability to serve as risk-free collateral underpinning the global financial system” and bring to the US the chaos of a defaulting emerging economy.

Miran has also hit out at Powell for urging more aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus in October 2020, about a month before that year’s election, to aid the economic recovery amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Powell was wrong politically and economically when he urged Congress to ‘go big’ on fiscal stimulus in October of 2020, on the eve of a Presidential election, suggesting that voters favour Democrats’ $3 trillion proposals over Republicans’ $500 billion”, Miran wrote on X in September. “We know what happened next.”

Miran must be confirmed by the US Senate.

Last month, Trump named Kevin Hassett as chair of the National Economic Council.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sweden has sharply criticised China for refusing to allow the Nordic country’s main investigator on board a Chinese vessel suspected of severing two cables in the Baltic Sea.

The Yi Peng 3 sailed away from its mooring in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday, and appears to be heading for Egypt after Chinese investigators boarded the ship on Thursday.

The Chinese team had allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark on board as observers, but did not permit access for Henrik Söderman, the Swedish public prosecutor, according to authorities in Stockholm.

“It is something the government inherently takes seriously. It is remarkable that the ship leaves without the prosecutor being given the opportunity to inspect the vessel and question the crew within the framework of a Swedish criminal investigation,” foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in comments provided to the Financial Times.

The Swedish government had put pressure on Chinese authorities for the bulk carrier to move from international waters into Swedish territory to allow a full investigation over the severing of Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German data cables last month.

People close to the probe said the boarding of the vessel on Thursday had shown there was little doubt it was involved in the incident.

Yi Peng 3 belongs to Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company that owns only one other vessel and is based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A representative of Ningbo Yipeng told the FT in November that “the government has asked the company to co-operate with the investigation”, but did not answer further questions.

There is a split among countries over the motivation behind the cutting of the cables. Some people close to the investigation said they believed it was bad seamanship that may have led to the Yi Peng 3’s anchor dragging along the seabed in the Baltic Sea.

However, other governments have said privately that they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid money to the ship’s crew.

The severing of the two cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship has damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.

The Newnew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship, damaged a gas pipeline in October 2023 by dragging its anchor along the bottom of the Baltic Sea for a considerable distance during a storm. Officials reacted slowly to that incident, allowing the vessel to leave the region without stopping, something that they were keen to prevent in the case of the Yi Peng 3.

Nordic and Baltic officials are sceptical about the possibility of the same thing occurring twice in quick succession. “The Chinese must be truly dreadful captains if this keeps on happening innocently,” said one Baltic minister.

More than 50% of youth in the United States are very or extremely worried about climate change, according to a recent survey in the scientific journal The Lancet.

The researchers, who surveyed over 15,000 people aged 16–25, also found that more than one in three young people said their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily lives.

The study adds to a growing area of research that finds that climate change, which is brought on primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is making young people distressed. Yet experts say there are proven ways to help young people cope with those feelings — and college classrooms could play a key role.

“When any of us talk about climate with students, we can’t just talk about what’s happening in the atmosphere and oceans,” says Jennifer Atkinson, a professor at the University of Washington. “We have to acknowledge and make space for them to talk openly about what’s happening in their own lives and be sensitive and compassionate about that.”

Atkinson studies the emotional and psychological toll of climate change. She also teaches a class on climate grief and eco-anxiety, during which students examine the feelings they have around climate change with their peers. The first time the class was offered in 2017, registration filled overnight, Atkinson says.

While teaching, Atkinson says she keeps in mind that many of her students have lived through floods or escaped wildfires — disasters that have increased in intensity as the world warms — before they even start college, yet often have had few places to find support. In the classroom, students come together, frequently finding solace and understanding in one another, she says.

“Students repeatedly say that the most helpful aspect isn’t anything they hear me say,” says Atkinson. “But rather the experience of being in the room with other people who are experiencing similar feelings and realizing that their emotions are normal and really widespread.”

Students at Cornell University discuss how climate change threatens some of the foods they eat. They also learn what they can do about it during a class on climate change and food.

Rebecca Redelmeier/WSKG

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Making climate change personal in class

Atkinson is one of several professors around the country who has opted to put emotions and solutions at the center of her climate teaching to help students learn how to address their worries about human-driven climate change.

At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Michael Hoffmann, who directed the Cornell Institute for Climate Change Solutions and held other university leadership positions before becoming a professor emeritus, introduced a class on food and climate change last year. The point of focusing on food, Hoffmann says, is to teach students how to connect with climate change through their personal experiences.

“When you tell the climate change story, it has to be relevant to people,” says Hoffmann. “I’d argue there isn’t much more anything more relevant than food.”

In 2021, Hoffman co-wrote a book on how climate change could impact beloved foods like coffee, chocolate, and olive oil. He started the class in 2023 after students told him they were feeling dread about what climate change could mean for their futures.

Part of the goal, Hoffmann says, is to provide students with clear steps they can take to address climate change. Evidence suggests that approach could counteract students’ anxieties.

Since 2022, researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have published a biannual report on climate change’s influence on the American mind. In the most recent report, released in July, they found most people are able to cope with the stress of climate change. However, about one in 10 say they feel anxious or on edge about global warming several days per week.

Bringing students together to connect about climate change and learn about solutions could help curb that toll, according to lead researcher and program director Anthony Leiserowitz.

“The best antidote to anxiety is action,” says Leiserowitz. “Especially, I would make a plug for action with other people.”

Facing the problem

Students, too, welcome more creative and emotionally-minded climate classes. Three-quarters of those who responded to the recent Lancet survey endorsed climate education and opportunities for discussion and support in academic settings.

At Cornell University, dozens of students have taken Hoffmann’s class. They learn about the global risks to food brought on by warming temperatures and how personal food decisions can play a role in contributing to planet-warming pollution.

Freshman Andrea Kim, who enrolled in the class this semester, welcomes those lessons. For a recent class, students met in a campus dining hall to make their dinner selections. Then they headed to the seminar room next door, where they partnered up to tell each other how the foods on their plate would be impacted by climate change.

After inspecting a classmate’s dinner, Kim explained that the rice, fish, and salad the student had chosen would all be threatened as global temperatures rose. It’s the kind of assignment, she says, that has helped her better understand the dangers of climate change and steps she can take.

“I think it’s good that we’re not just, like, pushing away the problem,” says Kim. “Because it’s still going to be there, whether or not we address it.”

Kim says she sometimes feels stressed about climate change, especially while scrolling through the news on her phone. But she and several other students say the class has helped them navigate those feelings.

Jada Ebron, a senior at Cornell, says she began the class feeling like there wasn’t much she could do about climate change. She says she was frustrated that large companies and governments continue to pollute and that people who are low-income and non-white suffer more as a result.

The class doesn’t shy away from those truths, says Hoffmann. But it aims to show students that their actions aren’t futile either.

To Ebron, that framing resonates.

“It forces you to challenge your beliefs and your ideas about climate change,” says Ebron, who spent part of the summer before her senior year researching how climate change impacts communities of color. “There is something that you can do about it, whether it’s as small as educating yourself or as big as participating in social justice movements.”