I’m talking Stephen Moore. From CNN Business (1/24):

In the likely event that Mexico does not provide the funds to build “a beautiful big wall” on our southern border, will Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and redirect funds? Mr. Trump has mentioned diverting monies from Puerto Rico recovery.

Today, we are fortunate to present a guest contribution written by Ashoka Mody, Charles and Marie Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Previously, he was Deputy Director in the International Monetary Fund’s Research and European Departments.

The combination of yield curve inversion and high uncertainty is the exception, rather than the rule.

Laurent Ferrara asks what’s the probability of a US recession in 12 months if one augments an utterly standard 10yr-3mo term structure model with US economic policy uncertainty (EPU) as measured by Baker, Bloom and Davis…

Seldom do we see such market moving data.

You should start looking at the state level household employment series; (the unemployment rate is calculated using this variable). Here is Wisconsin’s, as of today’s release.

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Elevated on the first, up then down on the second.

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.