Years (or months) from now, if the economy goes into recession, remember this is the team that brought you that outcome.
Notes: Clockwise from top left: Bessent (to Treasury; Yale; Key Square Group), Luttnick (to Commerce: Haverford; Cantor Fitzgerald), Hassett (to NEC; Swarthmore, Penn; AEI), Vought (to OMB; Wheaton, GWU Law; Heritage/CRA/Project 2025), Greer (to USTR; BYU, UVA Law; USTR and King & Spalding); Miran* (to CEA; BU, Harvard; Hudson Bay Capital Mgmt), Navarro (to EOP; Tufts, Harvard; UC Irvine and EOP), Faulkender* (to Treasury Dpty; UC Davis, Northwestern; Treasury, UMD). * indicates not yet confirmed by Senate (if necessary).
Of particular interest to me is CEA Chair-designate Stephen Miran’s views on tariffs (Bloomberg):
“The American economic story has seen periods of high tariff rates coincide with extraordinary economic success,” said Stephen Miran, Trump’s pick as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. “There’s nothing in the historical record that would say that it’s impossible to have a fabulous economy with high tariffs.”
How can CEA fulfill its traditional role (of killing really bad economic policy proposals) if the top guy doesn’t know what a bad policy is…?
Prof Chinn, you forgot Navarro’s 4 month stint as trade researcher and soap dropper at Federal Correctional Institute of Miami.
anybody besides Navarro spend time in prison on this list? anybody been barred or sanctioned by their professional society? how many were born with silver spoons? how many would be called a jagoff if they anonymously sat down in a pittsburgh working class bar and struck up a conversation with locals on how economics works? team old white man.
“How can CEA fulfill its traditional role (of killing really bad economic policy proposals) if the top guy doesn’t know what a bad policy is…?”
Make Smoot-Hawley Great Again
The two quoted sentences can be looked at separately. The first is true:
“The American economic story has seen periods of high tariff rates coincide with extraordinary economic success.”
The U.S. had a period of economic success with high tariffs. High tariffs, flintlocks, whaling ships, vast resources to be exploited without compensating owners, slavery (repeating myself here) and an infant-industry situation hardly equalled in human history. Maybe Miran sees parallels with today’s economy?
Let’s move on.
“There’s nothing in the historical record that would say that it’s impossible to have a fabulous economy with high tariffs.”
“Impossible” is a pretty stupid standard.
Do we live in a time of flintlocks, vast resources to exploit without compensating owners and a bunch of infant industries? If not, the historical record says Miran is wrong.