Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

Bleg: Puzzles in the Hassett Economic Report of the President, 2019

In the wake of the discussion of Figure 1-6 in the ERP, I thought it might be useful for me to collect up questions about puzzling or misleading graphs/tables or conclusions in the Report.

The entire document is here.

I don’t think I have ever made a similar request. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a similar CEA “massage the message” in quite the same way. Even the G.W. Bush CEA (of which I was briefly a part of) did not make such blatantly misleading graphics as highlighted in this post.

Clarification (3PM): I’ll then compile the contributions with my comments in a new post.

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Seven (Business) Days in May

[updated 6/3] Undervalued currencies as countervailable subsidies, tariffs on Mexico, flash mfg PMI drops, Drumpf again insists China pays US tariffs…so the yield curve inverts!

Figure 1: [Updated 6/3) Treasury 10yr-3mo spread (blue, left scale), 10yr-2yr (red, left scale), 5yr-3mo (teal, left scale), in %; 6/3 interest rates on-the-run at 1:30PM EST, and Economic Policy Uncertainty index (black, right scale). Source: Fed via FRED, US Treasury, and policyuncertainty.com, accessed 6/3/2019.

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The “Blip” Continues! Soybean Edition

A year ago, the July 2019 futures were $10.46, compared to $8.296 today.

Reader CoRev writes on July 9th:

…no one has denied the impact of tariffs on FUTURES prices. Those of us arguing against the constant anti-tariff, anti-Trump dialogs have noted this will probably be a price blip lasting until US/Chinese negotiations end. We are on record saying the prices will be back approaching last year’s harvest season prices.

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A Primer on Misalignment (You’ll Need It If Peter Navarro Has His Way)

Today’s Bloomberg article notes that my one-time coauthor Peter Navarro has pushed to have countervailing duty (CVD) investigations augmented with assessments of currency unvervaluation. A prominent target of CVD investigations has been China.

Figure 1: USD/CNY bilateral nominal exchange rate (blue, left inverted scale), and real trade weighted (broad) value of the CNY (red, right scale). May 2019 observation is for first 20 days. Light orange denotes Trump administration. Source: Federal Reserve via FRED, BIS.

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