The coup in Brazil. My friend Laura Carvalho has a piece in the Times, briefly but decisively making the case that, yes, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff is a coup. Also worth reading on Brazil: Matias Vernengo, Marc Weisbrot and Glenn Greenwald.
The bondholder’s view of theworld. Normally we are told that when interest rates on public debt rise, that’s a sign of the awesome power of bond markets, passing judgement on governments that they find unsound. Now we learn from this Bloomberg piece that when interest rates on public debt fall, that too is a sign of the awesome power of bond markets. Sub-1 percent rates on Irish 10-year bonds are glossed as: “Bond Market to Periphery Politicians: You Don’t Matter.” The point is that even without a government, Ireland can borrow for next to nothing. Now, you might think that if the “service” bond markets offer is available basically for free, to basically anyone — the takeaway of the piece — then it’s the bond markets that don’t matter. Well then you, my friend, will never make it as a writer of think pieces in the business press.
The bondholder’s view, part two. Brian Romanchuk says what needs to be said about some surprisingly credulous comments by Olivier Blanchard on Japan’s public debt.
Anyone who thinks that hedge funds have the balance sheet capacity to “fund” a G7 nation does not understand how financial markets are organised. There has been a parade of hedge funds shorting the JGB market (directly or indirectly) for decades, and the negative yields on JGB’s tells you how well those trades worked out.
The prehistory of Trumpism. Here is a nice piece by my University of Chicago classmate Rick Perlstein on the roots of Trump’s politics in the civil-rights-backlash politics of fear and resentment of Koch-era New York. (Also.) I’ve been wishing for a while that Trump’s role in the Central Park Five case would get a more central place in discussions of his politics, so I’m glad to see Rick take that up. It’s also smart to link it to the Death Wish/Taxi Driver/Bernie Goetz white-vigilante politics of the era. (Random anecdote: I first saw Taxi Driver at the apartment of Ken Kurson, who was at the U of C around the same time as Rick and I. He now edits the Trump-in-law owned New York Observer.) On the other hand, Trump’s views on monetary policy are disturbingly sane:
“The best thing we have going for us is that interest rates are so low,” says Trump, comparing the U.S. to a homeowner refinancing their mortgage. “There are lots of good things that could be done that aren’t being done, amazingly.”
The new normal at theFed. Here’s a useful piece from Tracy Alloway criticizing the idea that central banks will or should return to the pre-2008 status quo. It’s an easy case to make but she makes it well. This is a funny moment to be teaching monetary policy. Textbooks give a mix of the way things were 40 years ago (reserve requirements, the money multiplier) and the way things were 10 years ago (open market operations, the federal funds rate). And the way things are now? Well…
Me at the Jacobin. The Jacobin put up the transcript of an interview I did with Michel Rozworski a couple months ago, around the debates over potential output and the possibilities for fiscal stimulus. It’s a good interview, I feel good about it. Now, Noah Smith (on twitter) raises the question, when you say “the people running the show”, who exactly are you referring to? It’s a fair question. But I think we can be confident there is a ruling class, and try to understand its intentions and the means through which they are carried out, even if we’re still struggling to describe the exact process through which those intentions are formed.
Me on Bloomberg TV. Joe Weisenthal invited me to come on “What’d You Miss” last week, to talk about that BIS paper on bank capital and shareholder payouts. Here’s a helpful post by Matthew Klein on the same topic. And here is the Fed paper I mention in the interview, on the high levels of bank payouts to shareholders during 2007-2009, when banks faced large and hard to predict losses from the crisis and, in many cases, were simultaneously being supported in various ways by the Fed and the Treasury.
Maybe I should aspire to do a links post like this once a week. Today is Tuesday; is Tuesday a good day? Or would it be better to break a post like this into half a dozen short ones, and put them up one at a time?
Anyway, some links and thoughts:
Public debt in the 21st century. Here is a very nice piece by DeLong, arguing that over the next 50 years, rich countries should see a higher level of public expenditure, and a higher level of public debt, and that even much higher debt ratios don’t have any important economic costs. There’s no shortage of people making this general case, but this is one of the better versions I’ve seen.
The point that the “sustainability” of a given deficit depends on the relation between interest rates and growth rates has of course been made plenty of times, by people like Jamie Galbraith and Scott Fullwiler. But there’s another important point in the DeLong piece, which is that technological developments — the prevalence of increasing returns, the importance of information and other non-rival goods, and in general the development of what Marx called the “cooperative form of the labour process” — makes the commodity form less and less suitable for organizing productive activity. DeLong sees this as an argument for a secular shift toward government as opposed to markets as our central “societal coordinating mechanism” (and he says “Smithian market” rather than commodity form). But fundamentally this is the same argument that Marx makes for the ultimate supercession of capitalism in the penultimate chapter of Capital.
Short-termism at the BIS. Via Enno Schroeder, here’s a speech by Hyun Song Shin of the BIS, on the importance of bank capital. The most interesting thing for my purposes is how he describes the short-termism problem for banks:
Let me now come back to the question as to why banks have been so reluctant to plough back their profits into their own funds. … we may ask whether there are possible tensions between the private interests of some bank stakeholders versus the wider public interest of maintaining a soundly functioning banking system… shareholders may feel they can unlock some value from their shareholding by paying themselves a cash dividend, even at the expense of eroding the bank’s lending base.
As many of the shareholders are asset managers who place great weight on short-term relative performance in competition against their peers, the temptation to raid the bank’s seed corn may become too strong to resist. … These private motives are reasonable and readily understandable, but if the outcome is to erode capital that serves as the bank’s foundation for lending for the real economy, then a gap may open up between the private interests of some bank stakeholders and the broader public interest.
Obviously, this is very similar to the argument I’ve been making for the corporate sector in general. I especially like the focus on asset managers — this is an aspect of the short-termism story that hasn’t gotten enough attention so far. People talk about principal-agent problems here in terms of management as agents and shareholders as principals; but only a trivial fraction of shares are directly controlled by the ultimate owners, so there are plenty of principal-agent problems in the financial sector itself. When asset managers’ performance is evaluated every year or two — not to mention the performance of the individual employees — the effective investment horizon is going to be short, and the discount rate correspondingly high, regardless of the preferences of the ultimate owners.
I also like his diplomatic rejection of a loanable-funds framework as a useful way of thinking about bank lending, and his suggestion that the monetary-policy and supervisory functions of a central bank are not really distinct in practice. (I touched on this idea here.) The obligatory editorializing against negative rates not so much, but I guess it comes with the territory.
Market failure and government failure in the euro crisis. This piece by Peter Bofinger gets at some of the contradictions in mainstream debates around the euro crisis, and in particular in the idea that financial markets can or should “discipline” national governments. My favorite bit is this quote from the German Council of Economic Experts:
Since flows of capital as well as goods and services are market outcomes, we would not implicate the ‘intra-Eurozone capital flows that emerged in the decade before the crisis’ as the ‘real culprits’ …Hence, it is the government failures and the failures in regulation … that should take centre-stage in the Crisis narrative.
Well ok then!
Visualizing the yield curve. This is a very nice visualization of the yield curve for Treasury bonds since 1999. Two key Keynesian points come through clearly: First, that the short-term rate set by policy has quite limited purchase on the longer term market rates. This is especially striking in the 2000s as the 20- and 30-year rates barely budget from 5% even as the short end swings wildly. But second, that if policy rates are held low enough long enough, they can eventually pull down market rates. The key Keynes texts are here and here; I have some thoughts here, developed further here.
Trade myths. Jim Tankersley has a useful rundown in the Washington Post on myths about trade and tariffs. I’m basically on board with it: You don’t have to buy into the idolatry of “free trade” to think that the economic benefits of tariffs for the US today would be minimal, especially compared with the costs they would impose elsewhere. But I wish he had not bought into another myth, that China is “manipulating” its exchange rate. Pegged exchange rates are in general accepted by orthodoxy; for much of modern history they were the norm. And even where exchange rates are not officially pegged or targeted, they are still influenced by all kinds of macroeconomic policy choices. It’s not controversial, for instance, to say that low interest rates in the US tend to reduce the value of the dollar, and thereby boost US net exports. Why isn’t that a form of currency manipulation? (To be fair, people occasionally suggest that it is.) I heard Joe Stiglitz put it well, at an event a year or two ago: There is no such thing as a free-market exchange rate, it’s just a question of whether our central bank sets it, or theirs does. And in any case, the Bank of China’s purchase of dollars has to be considered alongside China’s capital controls, which — given the demand of wealthy Chinese for dollar assets — tend to raise the value of the renminbi. On net, the effect of Chinese government interventions has probably been to keep the renminbi “artificially” high, not low. (As I’ve been saying for years.)
The politics of the minimum wage. Here is a nice piece by Stephanie Luce on the significance of New York’s decision to raise the minimum wage to $15. Also in Jacobin, here’s Ted Fertik on why our horrible governor signed onto this and the arguably even more radical paid family leave bill.
It would be a great project for some journalist — I don’t think it’s been done — to explore how, concretely, this was won — the way the target was decided, what the strategy was, who was mobilized, and how. In mainstream press accounts these kinds of reforms seem to spring fully formed from the desks of executives and legislators, midwifed by some suitably credentialed experts. But when you dig beneath the surface there’s almost always been years of grassroots organizing before something like this bears fruit. The groups that do that work tend to avoid the press, I think for good reasons; but at some point it’s important to share with a wider public how the sausage got made. My impression in this case is that the key organizing work was done by Make the Road, but I’d love to see the story told properly. I haven’t yet read my friend Mark Engler’s new book, This Is an Uprising, but I think it has some good analysis of other similar campaigns.
Hillary’s getting a huge free ride on her purported mastery of the mechanics of policy, in contrast to Bernie. I decided to look into just one of her campaign initiatives. She likes to throw around the phrase “universal child care” or “universal pre-K.” But she isn’t proposing universal either. She’s proposing new money for pre-K, which is fine, but a) false advertising, and b) it’s not clear how it would “work.”
Google “Hillary universal child care.” The first thing you get is one of her web pages. On it we are told “Her proposal would work to ensure that every 4-year old in America has access to high-quality preschool in the next 10 years. It would do so by providing new federal funding for states that expand access to quality preschool for all four-year olds.” There’s nothing else from the campaign as far as I looked — 4 or 5 pages of google results.
“Would work to” means “won’t” in this context.
Most of the page is about how great preschool will be, for those who get it, and I’d be the first to agree that it would be. Think Progress informs us, again under that “universal” headline, that HRC also favors a “middle class tax cut” to help parents pay for childcare. To be clear, both of these initiatives deserve praise and point in the right directions.
The rub is that they are no more specific or rigorously motivated than the Sanders proposals that people have been blathering about.
On the strength of rousing approval by a compliant Congress unavailable to Bernie, HRC would supposedly provide a grant to those same evil state governments who couldn’t be trusted to implement single-payer, under a defunct Sanders proposal. Who could say whether the results would be “universal”? Is the money adequate, assuming full participation by the states? Is there anything that would prevent them substituting the money for their own limited programs? These are the usual questions applying to grants-in-aid. There are no wonky answers on her web site.
A published journalist of my acquaintance thinks the page is a real policy proposal, rather than an advertisement. She couldn’t tell the difference. She thought I was talking about a ‘brief summary’ of the proposal and gave me a link to what I was going on, which actually IS a brief summary.
Note that bumping up Head Start does not get you to universal either. It’s fine, but Head Start is a tiny program, relative to the relevant population.
How to “pay for it”? Forget it. They don’t say, not that I care. All the critics of “unpaid-for” single-payer BernieCare evidently don’t care either. Criticisms of Sanders’ vagueness on policy can be applied to HRC as well, if one delves just a little bit.
I look forward to all the deep-dive analyses of HRC’s projected path to universal health care coverage. Are there any? Why not? Because Hillary advocates are too busy blathering about Bernie. Those with policy expertise don’t apply it to Hillary’s treacle.
Last week, the Washington Post ran an article by Jim Tankersley on what would happen if Trump got his way and the US imposed steep tariffs on goods from Mexico and China. I ended up as the objectively pro-Trump voice in the piece. The core of it was an estimates from Mark Zandi at Moody’s that a 45% tariff on goods from China and a 35% tariff on goods from Mexico (I don’t know where these exact numbers came from) would have an effect on the US comparable to the Great Recession, with output and employment both falling by about 5 percent relative to the baseline. About half this 5 percent fall in GDP would be due to retaliatory tariffs from China and Mexcio, and about half would come from the US tariffs themselves. As I told the Post, I think this is nuts.
Let me explain why I think that, and what a more realistic estimate would look like. But first, I should say that Tankersley did exactly what one ought to do with this story — asked the right question and went to a respected expert to help him answer it. The problem is with what that expert said, not the reporting. I should also say that my criticisms were presented clearly and accurately in the piece. But of course, there’s only so much you can say in even a generous quote in a newspaper article. Hence this post.
I haven’t seen the Moody’s analysis (it’s proprietary). All I know is what’s in the article, and the general explanation that Tankersley gave me in the interview. But from what I can tell, Zandi and his team want to tell a story like this. When the US imposes a tariff, it boosts the price of imported goods but leads to no substitution away from them. Instead, higher import prices just mean lower real incomes in the US. Then, when China and Mexico retaliate, that does lead to substitution away from US goods, and the lost exports reduce US real incomes further. But only under the most extreme assumptions can you get Zandi’s numbers out of this story.
While this kind of forecasting might seem mysterious, it mostly comes down to picking values for a few parameters — that is, making numerical guesses about relationships between the variables of interest. In this case, we have to answer three questions. The first question is, how much of the tariff is paid by the purchasers of imported goods, as opposed to the producers? The second question is, how do purchasers respond to higher prices — by substituting to domestic goods, by substituting to imports from other countries, or by simply paying the higher prices? Substitution to domestic goods is expansionary (boosts demand here), substitution to imports from elsewhere is neutral, and paying the higher prices is contractionary, since it reduces the income available for domestic spending. And the third question is, how much does a given shift in demand ultimately move GDP? The answer to the first question gives us the passthrough parameter. The answer to the second question gives us two price elasticities — a bilateral elasticity for imports from that one country, and an overall elasticity for total imports. The answer to the third question gives us the multiplier. Combine these and you have the change in GDP resulting from the tariff. Of course if you think the initial tariffs will provoke retaliatory tariffs from the other countries, you have to do the same exercise for those, with perhaps different parameters.
Let’s walk through this. Suppose the US — or any country — increases taxes on imports: What can happen? The first question is, how is the price of the imported good set — by costs in the producing country, or by market conditions in the destination? If conditions in the destination country affect price — if the producer is unable or unwilling to raise prices by the full amount of the tariff — then they will have to accept lower revenue per unit sold. This is referred to as pricing to market or incomplete passthrough, and empirical studies suggest it is quite important in import prices, especially in the US. Incomplete passthrough may result in changing profit margins for producers, or they may be able to adjust their own costs — wages especially — in turn. Where trade is a large fraction of GDP, some of the tax may eventually be translated into a lower price level in the exporting country.
Under floating exchange rates, the tariff may also lead a depreciation of the exporting country currency relative to the currency of the country imposing the tariff. This is especially likely where trade between the two countries is a large share of total trade for one or both of them. In this case, a tariff is more likely to cause a depreciation of the Mexican peso than of the Chinese renminbi, since the US accounts for a higher fraction of Mexico’s exports than of China’s, and the renminbi is actively managed by China’s central bank.
Taking all these effects together, passthrough for US imports is probably less than 0.5. In other words, the majority of a tariff’s impact will probably be on dollar revenue for producers, rather than dollar costs for consumers. So a 10 percent tariff increases costs of imported goods by something less than 5 percent and reduces the revenue per unit of producers by something more than 5 percent.
The fraction of the tax that is not absorbed by lower exporter profit margins, lower wages in the export industry or a lower price level in the exporting country, or by exchange rate changes, will be reflected in higher prices in the importing country. The majority of trade goods for the US (as for most countries) are intermediate and capital goods, and even imported consumption goods are almost never purchased directly by the final consumer. So on the importing side, too, there will be firms making a choice between accepting lower profit margins, reducing wages and other domestic costs, or raising prices. Depending on exactly where we are measuring import prices, this might further reduce passthrough.
Let’s ignore this last complication and assume that a tax that is not absorbed on the exporting-country side is fully passed on to final price of imported goods. Purchasers of imported goods now respond to the higher price either by substituting to domestic goods, or substituting to imported goods from some third country not subject to the tax, or continuing to purchase the imports at the higher price. To the extent they substitute to domestic goods, that will boost demand here; to the extent they substitute to third-country goods, the tax will have no effect here.
These rates of substitution are described by the price elasticity of imports, computed as the ratio of the percentage change in the price, to the resulting percentage change in the quantity imported. So for instance if we thought that a 1 percent increase in the price of imported goods leads to a 2 percent fall in the quantity purchased, we would say the price elasticity is 2. There are two elasticities we have to think about — the bilateral elasticity and the overall elasticity. For example, we might think that the bilateral elasticity for US imports from China was 3 while the overall price elasticity for was 1. In that case, a 1 percent increase in the price of Chinese imports would lead to a 3 percent fall in US imports from China but only one-third of that would be through lower total US imports; the rest would be through higher imports from third countries.
To the extent the higher priced imported goods are purchased, this may result in a higher price of domestic goods for which the imports are an input or a substitute; to the extent this happens, the tax will raise domestic inflation but leave real income unchanged. For the US, import prices have a relatively small effect on overall inflation, so we’ll ignore this effect here. If we included it, we would end up with a smaller effect.
To the extent that the increase in import prices neither leads to any substitution away from the imported goods, nor to any price increase in domestic goods, it will reduce real incomes in the importing country, and leave incomes in the exporting country unchanged. Conversely, to the extent that the tariff is absorbed by lower wages or profit margins in the exporting country, or leads to substitution away from that country’s goods, it reduces incomes in the exporting country, but not in the importing country. And of course, to the extent that there is no substitution away from the taxed goods, government revenue will increase. Zandi does not appear to have explicitly modeled this last effect, but it is important in thinking about the results — a point I’ll return to.
Whether the increase in import prices increases domestic incomes (by leading to substitution to domestic goods) or reduces them, the initial effect will be compounded as the change in income leads to changes in other spending flows. If, let’s say, an increase in the price of Chinese consumer goods forces Americans to cut back purchases of American-made goods, then the workers and business owners in the affected industries will find themselves with less income, which will cause them to reduce their spending in turn. This is the familiar multiplier. The direct effect may be compounded or mitigated by financial effects — the multiplier will be larger if you think (as Zandi apparently does) that a fall in income will be accompanied by a fall in asset prices with a further negative effect on credit and consumption, and smaller if you think that a trade-induced change in income will be offset by a change in monetary (or fiscal) policy. In the case where central bank’s interest rate policy is always able to hold output at potential, the multiplier will be zero — shocks to demand will have no effect on output. This extreme case looked more reasonable a decade ago than it does today. In conditions where the Fed can’t or won’t offset demand impacts, estimates of the US multiplier range as high as 2.5; a respectable middle-of-the-road estimate would be 1.5.
Let’s try this with actual numbers.
Start with passthrough. The overwhelming consensus in the empirical literature is that less than half of even persistent changes in exchange rates are passed through to US import prices. This recent survey from the New York Fed, for instance, reports a passthrough of about 0.3:
following a 10 percent depreciation of the dollar, U.S. import prices increase about 1 percentage point in the contemporaneous quarter and an additional 2 percentage points over the next year, with little if any subsequent increases.
The factors that lead to incomplete passthrough of exchange rate movements — such as the size of the US market, and the importance exporters of maintaining market share — generally apply to a tariff as well, so it’s reasonable to think passthrough would be similar. So a 45% tariff on Chinese goods would probably raise prices to American purchasers by only about 15%, with the remainder absorbed by profits and/or wages at Chinese exporters.
Next we need to ask about the effect of that price on American purchases. There is a large literature estimating trade price elasticities; a sample is shown in the table below. As you can see, almost all the import price elasticities are between 0.2 and 1.0. (Price elasticities seem to be greater for US exports than for imports; they also seem to be higher for most other countries than for the US.) The median estimates is around 0.5 for overall US imports. Country-specific estimates are harder to find but I’ve seen values around 1.0 for US imports from both China and Mexico. Using those estimates, we would expect a 15% increase in the price of Chinese imports to lead to a 15% fall in imports from China, with about half of the substitution going to US goods and half going to imports from other countries. Similarly, a 10% increase in the price of goods from Mexico (a 35% tariff times passthrough of 0.3) would lead to a 10% fall in imports from Mexico, with half of that being a switch to US goods and half to imports from elsewhere.
Selected trade elasticity estimates for the US. The last column indicates if “price” was measured with an import price index (P), the exchange rate (E), or competitiveness, i.e. relative wages (C). The “P” estimates are most relevant for a tariff.
Finally, we ask how the combination of substitution away from imports from Mexico and China, and the rise in price of the remaining imports, would affect US output. US imports from China are about 2.7 percent of US GDP, and imports from Mexico are about 1.7 percent of GDP. So with the parameters above, substitution to US goods raises GDP by 7.5% x 2.7% (China) plus 5% x 1.7% (Mexico), or 0.29% of GDP. Meanwhile the higher prices of the remaining imports from China and Mexico reduce US incomes by 0.22 percent, for a net impact of a trivial one twentieth of one percent of GDP. Apply a standard multiplier of 1.5, and the tariffs boost GDP by 0.08 percent.
You could certainly get a larger number than this, for instance if you thought that passthrough of a tariff would be substantially greater than passthrough of exchange rate changes. And making US import demand just a bit less price-elastic is enough to turn the small positive impact into a small negative one. But it would be very hard to get an impact of even one percent of GDP in either direction. And it would be almost impossible to get a negative impact of the kind that Zandi describes. If you assume both that the tariffs are fully passed through to final purchasers, and that US import demand is completely insensitive to price then with a multiplier of 1.5, you get a 2.7 percent reduction in US GDP. Since this is close to Zandi’s number, this may be what he did. But again, these are extreme assumptions, with no basis in the empirical literature. That doesn’t mean you can’t use them, but you need to justify them; just saying the magic word “proprietary” is not enough. (Imagine all the trouble Jerry Friedman could have saved himself with that trick!)
And the very low price elasticity you need for this result has some funny implications. For instance, it implies that when China intervenes to weaken their currency, they are just impoverishing themselves, since — if demand is really price-inelastic — they are now sending us the same amount of goods and getting fewer dollars for each one. I doubt Zandi would endorse this view, but it’s a logical corollary of the ultra-low elasticity he needs to get a big cost to the US from the initial tariff. Note also that the low-elasticity assumption means that the tariff creates no costs for China or Mexico: their exporters pass the increased tariff on completely to US consumers, and lose no sales as a result. It’s not clear why they would “retaliate” for this.
Let’s assume, though, that China and Mexico do impose tariffs on US goods. US exports to China and Mexico equal 0.7 and 1.3 percent of US GDP respectively. Passthrough is probably higher for US exports — let’s say 0.6 rather than 0.3. Price elasticity is also probably higher — we’ll say 1.5 for both bilateral elasticities and for overall export elasticity. (In the absence of exchange-rate changes, there’s no reason to think that a fall in exports to China and Mexico will lead to a rise in exports to third countries.) And again, we’ll use a multiplier of 1.5. This yields a fall in US GDP from the countertariffs of just a hair under 1 percent. Combine that with the small demand boost from the tariff, and we get an overall impact of -0.9 percent of GDP.
I admit, this is a somewhat larger hit than I expected before I worked through this exercise. But it’s still much smaller than Zandi’s number.
My preferred back-of-the-envelope for the combined impact of the tariffs and countertariffs would be a reduction in US GDP of 0.9 percent, but I’m not wedded to this exact number. I think reasonable parameters could get you an impact on US GDP anywhere from positive 1 percent to, at the worst, negative 2 percent or so. But it’s very hard to get Zandi’s negative 5 percent. You need an extremely high passthrough for both import and export prices, plus extremely price-inelastic US import demand and extremely price-elastic demand for US exports — all three parameters well outside the range in the empirical literature. At one point a few years ago, I collected about 20 empirical estimates of US trade elasticities, and none of them had a price elasticity for US exports greater than 1.5. But even with 100% passthrough, and a generous multiplier of 2.0, you need an export price elasticity of 4 or so to get US GDP to fall by 5 points.
Still, while Zandi’s 5 percent hit to GDP seems beyond the realm of the plausible, one could perhaps defend a still-substantial 2 percent. Let’s think for a moment, though, about what this would mean.
First of all, it’s worth noting — as I didn’t, unfortunately, to the Post reporter — that tariff increases are, after all, tax increases. Whatever its effect on trade flows, a big increase in taxes will be contractionary. This is Keynes 101. Pick any activity accounting for 5 percent of GDP and slap a 40 percent tax on it, and it’s a safe bet that aggregate income will be lower as a result. The logic of the exercise would have been clearer if the tariff revenue were offset by a cut in some other tax, or increase in government spending. (Maybe this is what Trump means when he says Mexico will pay for the wall?) Then it would be clearer how much of the predicted impact comes from the tariff specifically, as opposed to the shift toward austerity that any such a big tax increase implies. The point is, even if you decide that a 2 percent fall in US GDP is the best estimate of the tariff’s impact, it wouldn’t follow that tariffs as such are a bad idea. It could be that a big tax increase is.
Second, let’s step back for a moment. While Mexico and China are two of our largest trade partners, they still account for less than a quarter of total US trade. Given passthrough of 0.3, the 45/35 percent tariff on Chinese/Mexican goods would raise overall US import prices by about 3 percent. Even with 100 percent passthrough, the tariffs would raise overall import prices by just 10 percent. The retaliatory tariffs would raise US export prices by about half this — 5 percent with full passthrough. (The difference is because these two countries account for a smaller share of US exports than of US imports). Now, let’s look at the movements of the dollar in recent years.
Since 2014, the dollar has risen 15 percent. That’s a 15 percent increase in the price of US goods in all our export markets — three times the impact of the hypothetical Mexican and Chinese tariffs. But before that, from 2002 to 2008, the dollar fell by over 20 percent. That raised the price of US imports by twice as much as the hypothetical Trump tariff. And so on on back to the 1970s. If you believe Zandi’s numbers, then the rise in the dollar over the past two years should already have triggered a severe recession. Of course it has not. It would be foolish to deny that movements of the dollar have had some effect on US output and employment. But no one, I think, would claim impacts on anything like this scale. Still, one thing is for sure: If you believe anything like Zandi’s numbers on the macro impacts of trade price changes, then it’s insane to allow exchange rates to be set by private speculators.
So if Zandi is wrong about the macro impact of tariffs, does that mean Trump is right? No. First of all, while I don’t think there’s any way to defend Zandi’s claim of a very large negative impact on GDP of a tariff (or of a more respectable, but economically equivalent, depreciation of the dollar), it’s almost as hard to defend a large positive impact. Despite all the shouting, the relative price of Chinese goods is just not a very big factor for aggregate demand in the US. If the goal is stronger demand and higher wages here, there are various things we can do. A more favorable trade balance with China (or Mexico, or anywhere else) is nowhere near the top of that list. Second, the costs of the tariff would be substantial for the rest of the world. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that China, over the past generation, has seen perhaps the largest rise in living standards in human history. We can debate how critical exports to the US were in this process, but certainly the benefits to China of exports to the US were vastly greater than whatever costs they created here.
But the fact that an idea is wrong, doesn’t mean that we can ignore evidence and logic in refuting it. Trumpism is bad enough on the merits. There’s no need to exaggerate its costs.
UPDATE: My spreadsheet is here, if you want to play with alternative parameter values.
