Wisconsin nonfarm payroll employment for January revised down, flatlines for February.
Figure 1: Wisconsin nonfarm payroll employment, February release (dark bold red), January release (red), December (pink), 000’s, s.a, on log scale. Light green shaded period denotes data benchmarked to QCEW data. Source: BLS.
The latest harebrained idea from Mr. Trump — but I could believe it more than the Mexicans paying for the wall.
Because the value added of Chinese exports to the United States is fairly low (i.e., exports incorporate lots of foreign components), it is unclear how much damage would be inflicted on bystanders. Wells Fargo uses data on trade in value added to show Taiwan’s exposure.
The conventionally reported trade balance (or “net exports”) for the United States from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) is net exports of goods and services, in nominal terms. (There are also trade balance measures on a Census basis and Balance of Payments basis, which differ in coverage and definitions.) The inflation adjusted trade balance is hard to calculate correctly, given the use of chain weighted measures of exports and imports. Here I plot a (Törnqvist) approximation to the real trade balance.
From The Hill:
President Trump’s incoming national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday he hopes impending economic tariffs against China could be “a little shock therapy” for the country.
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. This is an extended version of a column that appeared at Project Syndicate on March 19.
夫未戰而庙算胜者，得算多也；未戰而庙算不勝者，得算少也。
The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand. — Sun Tzu
Guess which sentence applies to which side in the incipient struggle?
I’ve got new event study examples for my finance course! Trade policy measures that are evaluated to hurt profitability of major US listed firms have definitive effects on the Dow Jones index.
Figure 1: Dow Jones Industrial Average index. Red bold lines at announcement of impending Section 232 national security based trade restrictions on steel, and Section 301 trade sanctions aimed at China. Source: TradingEconomics.
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Is the trend more important than if there is actually a surplus or deficit, as one commenter suggests? On a bilateral basis, I don’t think either is particularly important, but as a matter of fact I think we need to verify that the US-Canada bilateral trade balance in goods and services is (barely) positive in 2017, and trending upward on a quarterly basis.
Figure 1: US-Canada trade balance in 000’s US$, s.a. (blue), and 12 quarter trailing moving average (red). NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA, NBER, author’s calculations.
