What Could Trump Have Possibly Meant?

From Mr. Trump’s speech at the Economic Club of New York yesterday:

…we’ve added nearly $10 trillion of new value to our economy. That’s in a short period of time. Remember, I only use numbers from the time of the election because I can’t go to January 20th. It’s not fair. We picked up tremendous stock market and economic numbers. They actually went wild the day after I won.

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The Trumpian World as Natural Experiment

The Trump economic policy regime (if it can be called that) has provided several “natural experiments”. Do corporate tax rate reductions “pay for themselves”? Does expansionary fiscal policy at full employment lead to large increases in output? Does increasing trade protection necessarily lead to an increase in the trade balance? Does a bellicose and confused trade negotiating stance accelerate fixed investment? I think the answers are No, No, No, and No. On this last point, see Altig et al. on Macroblog:

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