A reader alerts me – from CNBC, indications farmers are going to take a hit, as export volume drops off a cliff.

United States tariffs are beginning to take their toll on farmers and the storage, shipping and freight operations they need to move their crops to market.

In North Dakota, soybeans from 2017 are still in storage after China pulled its contracts. Of the 15.9 million bushels left from that year’s crop, 12.1 million bushels are sitting in grain elevators. That is an increase of 68 percent.

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Has spending on international travel to and tourism in the US dropped more than expected based on world GDP and the value of the dollar? Yes.

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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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As international tourist arrivals have risen globally, those for the US have declined, as noted here.

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Neil Irwin at the NYT has an interesting article on the localized recession in 2016. One conclusion he makes:
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The following graph compares average tariff levels across countries.

One can take comfort from the fact US tariff rates are historically low.

I have two observations:

• We live in an era of global value chains, so that the value added has been chopped up and split across nations. In this context, a tariff of 10% on final value is a lot more than 10% on value added.
  
• This shock to global value chains comes on the back of an already stretched logistics network.
  

The latter point is highlighted by the following graph:

The latter is perhaps a temporary phenomenon, likely to end when the economy goes into recession. However, the former is likely more persistent.

Global value chains have been built up over decades; rejiggering these chains to accommodate tariffs of indefinite duration is sure to be disruptive, possibly inflationary (although that depends on monetary policy).

That’s a title I borrowed from a paper by Barry Eichengreen; the actual title is “International environment and US monetary policy: a textual analysis” written by Laurent Ferrara and Charles-Emmanuel Teuf:

What role does the international environment play in shaping US monetary policy decisions? To measure its influence, we construct an international indicator extracted from minutes of Fed monetary policy committee meetings.

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That’s the caption to this graph:
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The International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) in International Economics, sponsored by Kimberly Querrey, offers business economists as well as university-based economics scholars hands-on experience in the U.S. government to expand their range of thinking and work on international economic policy. Possible host placements for the fellowship appointment include but are not limited to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, U.S. Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve Bank, and relevant parts of the U.S. Department of State and the White House [so the Fed, the IMF, the World Bank, the Treasury or any other policy institution are also possibilities]. The IAF in International Economics aims to enrich the teaching, scholarship, and research of academics, inform the practice of business economists, and expose policymakers to cutting edge scholarly research and academic debates.

For more information, see here.

Following up on yesterday’s tweets on estimates of excess mortality, official statement on twitter:

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