Tag Archives: tariffs

Trumponomics—good for the economy?

December 3, 2019 By in administration economic strategy, economics, foreign trade, government economic policy, macroeconomics, Strategy, Trump's economics, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Supporters of Donald Trump tend to excuse his white nationalism, his erratic policymaking, the paucity of his factual knowledge, the whiff of sadism in his treatment of immigrants, the apparent promotion of family business interests…by saying that at least he’s good for the economy.  They typically cite low unemployment, GDP growth and the stock market as proof.

Is that correct?

Yes, unemployment is low.  Yes, the economy is growing at trend–after receiving a boost from fiscal stimulation (the corporate tax cut) last year.  And the stock market did rally on the announcement of Trump’s election victory.  (We can quibble about stock market performance:  though significantly higher today, the US was pretty much the worst market in the world in 2017, when virtually everybody was up–and more than us; since the 20% boost in US corporate after-tax income it’s up another 10%–much better performance than markets where the tax rate has remained unchanged).

But I think this rationalization, offered typically by wealthy beneficiaries of income tax changes, simply deflects attention away from administration policies that can potentially do severe long-term damage to US prospects.  Here are a few:

–tariff wars.  Tariffs can be an important way to give industries of the future breathing room to develop, by insulating them from more sophisticated foreign competition.  The administration, however, is protecting low value-added manual labor jobs against competition from more efficient firms in China.  These tariffs have the perverse effect of retarding manufacturing development here while forcing China to turn to higher value-added work.  The latter is a perennial stumbling block for developing countries, so the excuse of Trump tariffs to force the move to higher value-added industry is a rare gift to Beijing.

In addition, the US has been a prime destination for multinationals’ advanced manufacturing because of the large local market and the experienced workforce.  The possibility of tariffs–and their apparently unpredictable implementation–has stopped this flow.

–retaliatory tariffs.  Tariffs don’t go unanswered. China responded to US levies by shifting purchases of soybeans to Brazil and other countries.   As/when tariff wars end, the soybean market will most likely not revert to the status quo ante; once in the door, other, arguably more dependable, suppliers will doubtless retain market share.  By the way, when the administration withdrew from the TPP, it also made US soybeans more expensive in another Pacific market, Japan.

–restrictions on immigration.  The solution for tech companies who are unable to hire foreign scientists to work in the US because they can’t get visas is to move R&D operations to, say, Canada.  Also, the administration’s white supremacism has made foreigners question whether they will be safe in the US as tourists or students, hurting both industries.  Chinese citizens may also feel it’s unpatriotic to travel here.  A bigger worry:  will this force US-based multinationals to begin to regard themselves as no longer American?

–zero/negative interest rates.  This is a weird situation in financial markets, which, to my equity-oriented mind, is bound to end badly. Ultra-low rates are also trouble for risk-averse savers, including traditional pension plans.  In the US, downward pressure on rates comes both from foreign bond arbitrage and administration demands that the Fed offset tariff damage to growth with looser money policy.

 

Meanwhile, what’s not being addressed:  infrastructure, health care including drug prices, education, retraining displaced workers (where we’re worst in the OECD)

 

 

 

yield curve inversion, external shock and recession

August 15, 2019 By in Current Market Thoughts, Recent Market Action, securities markets, Strategy, tariff protection, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Stock markets around the world sold off yesterday in wicked fashion after the yield on the 10-year Treasury “inverted,”  that is, fell below the yield on the 2-year.  This has very often been the signal of an upcoming recession.  Typically, though, the inversion happens because the Fed is raising short-term interest rates in an attempt to slow too-rapid economic growth.  So it’s first and foremost a signal of aggressive Fed tightening, which has in the past almost always gone too far, causing an economic contraction.

In the present case, this is not the situation.  The Fed is signalling ease, not tightening.  Arguably, arbitrage between long-dated US and EU government bonds is suppressing the 10-year.

While trading robots, unleashed by the inversion, may have been behind the negative stock market action yesterday, my sense is that this is not all that’s going on.  I think the market is beginning to step back and focus on the bigger economic picture.  It may not like what it sees, namely:

–worldwide, economies are now being hit by a significant negative external shock.  It’s not a tripling of the oil price, as was the case in the 1970s, nor a collapsing financial system, as in 2008.  Instead, this time it’s the Trump tariffs, which appear to be reducing growth in the US by more than expected (not that anyone had extremely precise thoughts)

–the 2017 tax bill is not paying for itself, as the administration claimed at the time, but is adding to the government deficit instead–implying that further fiscal stimulation is less likely.  Giving extra cash to the ultra-rich, who tend to save rather than spend, and keeping tax breaks for industries of the past hasn’t bought much oomph to growth, either

–channeling his inner Herbert Hoover, Mr. Trump is trying to export the weakness he has created by devaluing the dollar.

 

Stepping back a bit to view the larger picture,

–pushing interest rates near to zero, depreciating the currency and defending the politically powerful industries of the 1970s all seem to mirror the game plan that has produced thirty years of stagnation in Japan and similar results in large parts of the EU.  Not pretty.

–on a smaller scale, this brings to mind Mr. Trump’s fundamentally misguided and ultimately disastrous foray into Atlantic City gaming, a venture where he appears to have profited personally but where those who supported and trusted him by owning DJT stock and bonds were financially decimated.

 

It seems to me that Wall Street is starting to come to grips with two possibilities:  that there may be only impulsiveness, and no master plan or end game to the Trump trade wars; and that Congresspeople of all stripes realize this but are unwilling to do anything to thwart the president’s whims.  In other words, the real issue being pondered is not recession but Trump-induced secular stagnation.

 

 

 

$30 billion in new tariffs–implications

August 2, 2019 By in administration economic strategy, Current Market Thoughts, Recent Market Action, Strategy, tariff protection, tariffs, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Yesterday Mr. Trump announced by tweet that he intends to impose a 10% duty, effective next month, on all US imports from China that are not yet under tariff.  That’s about $300 billion worth, which would produce an extra $30 billion in tax revenue for the government, were imports to continue at the pre-tariff rates.

What’s different about the current move is that tariffs will be predominantly on final goods, that is, stuff that’s completely made and ready for sale, things like like toys and everyday clothing.  For the first time, tariffs won’t be disguised.  Up until now, they’ve been mostly on raw materials or parts, where the connection between the tax and price increases of the final product is obscured–the political fallout therefore milder.   The new round will be more visible.

 

Standard microeconomics will apply:

–the cost of the new tax will be borne in part by US companies and in part by consumers, depending on how much market power each has

–over some period of time, companies and consumers will both look for lower-price substitutes for items being taxed.  Firms will, say, offer lower quality merchandise at the current price point; consumers will either buy fewer items or shift to cheaper merchandise

 

The new tariff amounts to a subtraction of about $250 from family discretionary income, meaning income after taxes and all necessities are taken care of.  That’s not a big number.  As with the other Trump tariffs, however, average Americans will be disproportionately hurt.  The bottom 20% by income have less than nothing after necessities now, so they will be the worst off.  Residents of the poorest states–eight of the bottom ten voted for Trump–as well.  So too anyone on a fixed income.

 

Netting out the positive effect of the 2017 income tax cut, the only winners are the top 1%, traditional Republican voters.  Other Trump supporters appear to be the biggest losers, although far they don’t appear to have connected the dots.  Nor does anyone in Congress seem to be questioning the administration rationale that national security does not require better infrastructure and education but does demand more expensive t-shirts and toys.

 

The stock market selloff underway today doesn’t seem to me to be warranted by the new tariff.  And it’s not exactly news that Washington is dysfunctional:  we’re led by a man who thinks our independence was won by controlling the airports; the leading opposition candidate somehow mistakenly thought his businessman/repairman/car salesman father was a laborer in the Pennsylvania coal mines.  So the most likely explanation is that in August human traders/portfolio managers head for the beaches, leaving newspaper-reading robots in control of Wall Street.

If that’s correct, the thing to do is to look for stocks to buy where the selloff appears crazy, getting the money from clunkers, which typically hold up in times like this or from winners whose size has gotten too big.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Macroeconomics for Professionals

July 31, 2019 By in administration economic strategy, economics, fed funds rate, Federal Reserve, macroeconomics, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Starting-out note:  there’s an investment idea in here eventually.

I’ve been going through Macroeconomics for Professionals:  a Guide for Analysts and Those Who Need to Understand Them, written by two IMF professionals, with the intention of giving it, or something like it, to one of my children who’s getting more interested in stock market investing.  I’m not finished with the book, but so far, so good.

counter-cyclical government policy

The initial chapter of MfP is about counter-cyclical government policy, a topic I think is especially important right now.

Picture an upward sloping sine curve.  That’s a stylized version of the pattern of economic advance and contraction that market economies experience.  Left to their own devices, the size of economic booms and subsequent depressions tend to be very large.  The Great Depression of the 1930s that followed the Roaring Twenties–featuring a 25% drop in output in the US and a decade of unemployment that ranged between 14%-25%–is the prime example of this.  National governments around the world made that situation worse with tariff wars and attempts to weaken their currencies to gain a trade advantage.  A chief goal of post-WWII economics has been to avoid a recurrence of this tragedy.

The general idea is counter-cyclical government policy, meaning to slow economic growth when a country is expanding at a rate higher than its long-term potential (about 2% in the US) and to stimulate growth when expansion falls below potential.

 

applying theory in today’s Washington

Entering the ninth year of economic expansion–and with the economy already growing at potential–Washington, which had provided no fiscal stimulus in 2009 when it was desperately needed, decided to give the economy a boost with a large tax cut. Although pitched as a reform, with lower rates offset by the elimination of special interest tax breaks, none of the latter happened.  Then, just a few days ago, Washington gave the economy another fiscal boost.  Mr. Trump, channeling his inner Herbert Hoover, is also pressing for further interest rate cuts to achieve a trade advantage through a weakened dollar.

This is scary stuff for any American.  The country faced a similar situation during the Nixon administration, which exerted pressure on the Fed to keep rates too low during the early 1970s.  Serious economic problems that this brought on didn’t emerge until several years later, when they were compounded by the second oil shock in 1978 (that was my first year in the stock market; I was a fledgling oil analyst).

why??

Why, then, is Mr. Trump trying to juice the US economy when he should really be trying to wean it off the drug of ultra-low rates?

I think it’s safe to assume that he doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s doing (the thing Americans of all stripes recognize, and like the least, about Mr. Trump, a brilliant marketer, is how little he actually knows).   If so, I can think of two reasons:

–as with many presidents a generation ago, he may see ultra-loose money as helping his reelection bid, and/or

–the “easy to win” trade wars may be hurting the US economy much more deeply than he expected and he sees no way to reverse course.

If I had to guess, I suspect the latter is the case and that the former is an added bonus.  I think the main counter argument, i.e., that this is all about the 2020 election, is that the administration seems to be systematically eliminating any parties/agencies that want to investigate Russian interference in domestic politics.

Either would imply that software-based multinational tech companies that have led the stock market for a long time will continue to be Wall Street winners–and that the weakness they are currently experiencing is mostly an adjustment of the valuation gap (which has become too large) between them and the rest of the market.

In any event, interest rate-sensitives and fixed income are the main areas to avoid.  If the impact of tariffs is an important motivating factor, then domestic businesses that cater to families with average or below-average incomes will likely be hurt the worst.

 

 

 

 

Trumponomics and tariffs

July 2, 2019 By in economics, foreign trade, macroeconomics, microeconomics, tariff protection, tariffs, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Note:  I’ve been writing this in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks.  It doesn’t reflect whatever agreement the US and China made over the past weekend.  (More on that as/when details become available.)  But I’m realizing that it’s better to write something that’s less than perfect instead of nothing at all..  I think the administration’s economic plan, if that’s the right word for a string of ad hoc actions revealed by tweet, will have crucial impacts–mostly negative–for the US and for multinational corporations located here.  I’ll post about that in a day or two.

 

On the plus side, Mr. Trump has been able to get the corporate income tax rate in the US reduced from 35% to 21%, stemming the outflow of US industry to lower tax-rate jurisdictions (meaning just about anyplace else in the world).  Even that has a minus attached, though, since he failed to make good on his campaign pledge to eliminate the carried interest tax dodge that private equity uses.  The tax bill also contained new tax reductions for the ultra-wealthy and left pork-barrel tax relief for politically powerful businesses untouched.

 

At its core, international Trumponomics revolves around the imposition of import duties on other countries in the name of “national security,” on the dubious rationale that anything that increases GDP is a national security matter and that tariffs are an effective mechanism to force other countries to do what we want.  (Oddly, if this is correct, one of Mr. Trump’s first moves was to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, thereby triggering an escalating series of new tariffs on farm exports to Japan by  our “Patriot Farmers,” many of whom voted for Mr. Trump.  I assume he didn’t know.)

If the Trump tariff policy has a coherent purpose, it seems to me to be:

–to encourage primary industry (like smelting) and manual labor-intensive manufacturing now being done in developing countries to relocate to the US (fat chance, except for strip mining and factories run by robots)

–to encourage advanced manufacturing businesses abroad that serve US customers to build new operations in the US, and

–to retard the development of Chinese tech manufacturing by denying those companies access to US-made components.

 

The results so far:

–the portion of tariffs on imported goods (paid by US importers to the US customs authorities) passed on to consumers has offset (for all but the ultra-wealthy) the extra income from the 2017 tax cuts

–the arbitrary timing and nature of the tariffs Trump is imposing seems to be doing the expected —discouraging industry, foreign and domestic, from building new plants in the US.  BMW, for example, had been planning on building all its luxury cars for export to China here, because US labor costs less than EU labor.  The threat of retaliatory tariffs by China for those imposed by the US made this a non-starter.

–Huawei.  This story is just beginning.  It has a chance of turning really ugly.  For the moment, inferior US snd EU products become more attractive.  Typically, such protection also slows new product development rather than accelerating it.  (Look at the US auto industry of the mid-1970s, a tragic example of this phenomenon.)   US-based tech component suppliers are doing what companies always do in this situation:  they’re  finding ways around the ban:  selling to foreign middlemen who resell to Huawei, or supplying from their non-US factories.  Even if such loopholes remain open, Mr. Trump is establishing that the US can’t be relied on as a tech supplier. Two consequences:  much greater urgency for China to create local substitutes for US products; greater motivation for US-based multinationals to locate intellectual property and manufacturing outside the US.