A year ago, the July 2019 futures were $10.46, compared to $8.296 today.
Reader CoRev writes on July 9th:
…no one has denied the impact of tariffs on FUTURES prices. Those of us arguing against the constant anti-tariff, anti-Trump dialogs have noted this will probably be a price blip lasting until US/Chinese negotiations end. We are on record saying the prices will be back approaching last year’s harvest season prices.
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 May 23rd.
Given recent developments in the use of Section 232 in steel, aluminum, possibly uranium and automobiles, as well as the increasingly expensive bailouts of the ag sector, it behooves us to see some earlier perspectives on the use of such protectionist and interventionist measures, as provided by Peter Navarro.
Today’s Bloomberg article notes that my one-time coauthor Peter Navarro has pushed to have countervailing duty (CVD) investigations augmented with assessments of currency unvervaluation. A prominent target of CVD investigations has been China.
Figure 1: USD/CNY bilateral nominal exchange rate (blue, left inverted scale), and real trade weighted (broad) value of the CNY (red, right scale). May 2019 observation is for first 20 days. Light orange denotes Trump administration. Source: Federal Reserve via FRED, BIS.
Figure 1: Treasury 10yr-3mo spread (blue), 10yr-2yr (red), 5yr-3mo (teal), in %. Source: Fed via FRED, US Treasury.
Figure 2: Treasury 10yr-3mo spread (blue), 10yr-2yr (red), 5yr-3mo (teal), in %, in 2019. Source: Fed via FRED, US Treasury.
Over the last month, the 10yr-3mo spread has averaged 4 bps — so not quite inversion on a monthly basis.
In every single state in the Great Lakes region, save Michigan, manufacturing employment has either peaked or (charitably) gone on a growth hiatus.
Some NBER BCDC key indicators have peaked, as noted in this post. The more volatile manufacturing sector is showing stress as well.
Figure 1: Employment in manufacturing (blue), aggregate hours of nonsupervisory and production workers in manufacturing (teal), and manufacturing production (red), all in logs, 2019M01=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve via FRED, and author’s calculations.
Several key series look like they have peaked; nowcasts indicate slowing growth. Forward looking indicators look “iffy”.
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), all log normalized to 2019M01=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (5/3 release), and author’s calculations.
That’s the rationale, according to the Association of Global Automakers, as quoted in Car and Driver! Mr. Trump declares Section 232 tariffs for automobiles.
Thus, the Secretary found that American-owned automotive R&D and manufacturing are vital to national security. Yet, increases in imports of automobiles and automobile parts, combined with other circumstances, have over the past three decades given foreign-owned producers a competitive advantage over American-owned producers.
