Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink bold), all log normalized to 2019M01=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (7/25 release), and author’s calculations.
A year ago, there was some debate (e.g., S. Kopits) whether tariffs on US soybeans would have any impact on US soybean exports — that is since soybeans were highly substitutable, US soybean exports would be redistributed w/o an impact on prices.
From Deutsche Bank today:
This despite Trump’s temporary delay on additional China tariffs.
Figure 1: September 2019 corn futures, accessed 8/13/2019. Source: Barchart.com.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
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. A shorter version appeared in Project Syndicate on August 9th.
I get to teach Public Affairs 854, “Macroeconomic Policy and International Financial Regulation” and Economics 435 “The Financial System” this fall. There’s a cosmic confluence this year, in terms of the subject:
Donald Trump’s pronouncements can typically be taken as contra-indicators. In other words, what he says is invariably wrong. So, you gotta wonder on China…
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