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US lawmakers have brought General Motors CEO Mary Barra to Capitol Hill for a series of private meetings this week as the company comes under fire after announcing up to 14,000 job cuts. Barra isn't publicly testifying this week. She's meeting behind closed doors with several lawmakers representing regions that will be hit hard by the cuts. What’s really behind these discussions? Meanwhile, trade conflicts have cost Nebraska's economy more than $1 billion. The Nebraska Farm Bureau says the state's farmers have lost upward of a billion dollars in revenue from ongoing trade conflicts, according to a new report. Are these losses limited to the agriculture sector in the Midwestern US, or is this the tip of the iceberg? Are we looking at farmers losing farms if this trade war continues? It’s one thing to retool a factory. For example, with GM talking about closing plants in Ohio and Michigan and the discussion with Barra, you can re-tool and retrain plant workers, but what do you do with displaced farmers across the Midwest of the US?

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Dr. Jack Rasmus — Professor of economics at Saint Mary's College of California and author of Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression, who also writes at jackrasmus.com.