That’s the title of a new paper by Andy Rose:

A country’s exports rise when its leadership is approved by other countries. I show this using a standard gravity model of bilateral exports, a panel of data from 2006 through 2017, and an annual Gallup survey which asks people in up to 157 countries whether they approve of the job performance of the leadership of China, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Holding other things constant, a country’s exports are higher if its leadership is approved by the importer; ‘soft power’ promotes exports. The soft power effect is statistically and economically significant; a one percent increase in leadership approval raises exports by around two-thirds of a percent. This effect is reasonably robust, and different measures of soft power deliver similar results. I conservatively estimate that the >20 percentage point decline in foreign approval of American leadership between 2016 (the final year of Obama’s presidency) and 2017 (Trump’s first year) lowered American exports by at least $3 billion.

Ungated version here.

Mr. Trump considers redirecting funds committed to rebuilding Puerto Rico toward the building of the Wall. From WaPo:

as of 10PM Eastern:

It’s striking. GDP correlates with oil in recent years, but not always, so why didn’t the magic of Jindalnomics work?

Brat to Liberty University…

Last year’s recap was subtitled “Fighting against the normalization of lying”. At least this year, lies are called lies. Now it’s time to shun the liars, and relegate them to where they belong.

A correlation shows up in the last month or so:

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Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

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That’s all you need to know.

Update, 1/1/2019: Bob Flood sends this graph which — as he characterizes it — “seems to good to be true” (in a social scientist sort of way).

In the wake of the pre-holiday meltdown in the financial markets, I thought for a few minutes about who would be doing crisis management, especially after SecTreas Mnuchin’s ham-fisted attempt to calm the markets. My musings did not calm my nerves. Consider the January 2009 team and the (likely, barring further dismissals) January 2019 team, and you’ll see what I mean.