Tag Archives: Trumponomics

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)

 

 

 

autos, emissions and Trumponomics

September 24, 2019 By in Trump's economics, Trump, taxes and trade, Trumponomics, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve followed the auto industry since the early 1980s, but have rarely owned an auto stock—brief forays into Toyota, later Peugeot (1986) and Porsche (2003?) are the only names that come to mind.

 

The basic reasons I see to avoid the auto manufacturers in the developed world:

–chronic overcapacity

–continuing shift of intellectual property creation, innovation, brand differentiation—and better-than-commodity profits–from manufacturers to component suppliers

–the tendency of national politics to influence company operations and prospects.

 

In addition, the traditional industry is very capital intensive, with a high capacity utilization required (80%?) to reach breakeven.  The facts that unit selling prices are high and new purchases easy to put off for a year or two mean that the new car industry is highly cyclical.

More than that, today’s industry is in the early stages of a transformation away from units that burn fossil fuels, and are therefore a major source of air pollution, to electric vehicles.  The speed at which this change is happening has accelerated over the past decade outside the US because pollution has become a very serious problem in China and because automakers in the EU have been shown to have falsified performance data for their diesel-driven offerings in a poorly thought out effort to meet anti-pollution rules.

California, which had a nineteenth-century-like city pollution problem around Los Angeles as late at the mid-1970s, has led the US charge for clean air.  It helps its clout that CA is the country’s largest car market (urban legend:  thanks in part to GM’s aggressive lobbying against public transport in southern CA in the mid-20th century).  CA has also been joined by about a dozen other states who go along with whatever it decides.  The auto manufacturers have done the same, because the high capital intensity of the car industry means building cars to two sets of fuel usage specifications makes no sense.

 

Enter Donald Trump.  His administration has decided to roll back pollution reduction measures put in place by President Obama.  CA responded by agreeing with Ford, VW, Honda and BMW to establish Obama-like, but somewhat less strict, requirements for cars sold in that state.  Trump’s reposte has been to call the agreement an anti-trust violation, to claim the power to revoke the section of the law that permits CA to set state pollution standards and to threaten to withhold highway funds from CA because the air there is too polluted (?).

 

Other than pollical grandstanding, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on.

Who benefits from lower gas mileage cars?     …Russia and Saudi Arabia, whose economies are almost totally dependent on selling fossil fuels; and the giant multinational oil companies, whose exploration efforts until recently have been predicated on demand increasing strongly enough to push prices up to $100 a barrel.

Who gets hurt by the Trump move?     …to the degree that it prolongs widespread use of inefficient gasoline-powered cars, the biggest potential losers are US-based auto firms and the larger number of US residents who become ill in a more polluted environment.  Why the car companies?  Arguably, they will put less R&D effort into developing less-polluting cars, including electric vehicles.  The desertification of China + disenchantment with diesel will have Europe and Asia, on the other hand, making electric cars a very high priority.  It wouldn’t be surprising to find in a few years a replay of the situation the Detroit automakers were in during the 1970s—when cheap, well-built imports flooded the country without the Big Three having competitive products.

It’s one of the quirks of the US stock market that it has very little direct representation of the auto industry.  So the idea that profits there will be somewhat higher as the firms skimp on R&D will have little/no positive impact on the S&P.  Even the energy industry, the only possible beneficiary of this Trump policy, is a mere shadow of its former self.  Like Trump’s destruction of the American brand—Apple has dropped from #5 in China to #50 since his election—all I can see is damaging downside.

I think the Trump policy is intentional, like his trade wars and his income tax cut for the super-rich.  The most likely explanation for all these facets of Trumponomics is either he doesn’t realize the potentially grave economic damage he’s doing or it’s not a particularly high priority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trumponomics and Huawei

July 8, 2019 By in foreign trade, Strategy, tariff protection, tariffs, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Effective May 16th, the Trump administration placed Chinese tech company Huawei on the entity list, meaning no American company can sell products, hardware or software, to Huawei without government permission.  In addition, the presumption of the administrators of the list is that permission will be denied.

Being on the entity list seems to mean no Intel or ARM-based microprocessors for Huawei-built computers and telecom equipment, and no Android software for its cellphones.

The US  had already been putting pressure on US telecoms, big and small, as well as allies around the world not to purchase Huawei offerings, especially of next-generation telecom infrastructure equipment–a difficult sell, given that Huawei products are better and cheaper than EU or US alternatives.  But the entity list move is a huge escalation.  It seems to pretty much put Huawei out of business unless/until it develops alternate sources of supply.

It seems to me that this decision is qualitatively different from taxing Chinese products entering the US.  The near-term effects are likely to be strongly negative for Hauwei; long-term consequences, in contrast, are likely to be strongly negative for the US, in a number of ways:

–by saying the US will not tolerate significant Chinese competition in tech industries, Mr. Trump is reframing a dispute about terms of trade into a struggle for cultural/economic dominance.  Arguably, this is what is really going on anyway, but making it explicit gives China a cause to rally around

–Beijing’s response to the Huawei decision will presumably be to try to jump start its domestic chip business, an area that is (oddly, to my mind) totally unimpressive despite having been a national priority for decades.  The obvious course for the US today, it seems to me, is to retrain workers and improve our education system, with emphasis on STEM subjects.  That, of course, is a non-starter for both major political parties

–US tech companies must now begin to think about whether they are American enterprises (meaning: willing to forgo Chinese business as/when Washington dictates) or multinationals based in the US.  This may not be a burning issue for mature US firms like Microsoft or Google, although Washington’s white supremacism and nativism are already compelling companies like this to locate research centers outside the US (either because the US will not admit accomplished foreign scientists or they fear for their safety).  For startups, however, Mr. Trump is making a compelling case that, say, Canada is a better place to establish themselves

–tech companies of all stripes will have to think long and hard before building new manufacturing capacity in the US

 

Pre-Huawei, one main consequence of the Trump trade strategy has been to substantially weaken the Chinese status quo’s resistance to shifting that economy away from low value-added exports.  With developing economies, such resistance is, in my experience, an almost insurmountable obstacle to progress.  Huawei gives Beijing a clear mandate to create a high-tech component industry, however.  Making it a victim of malign foreign influences only increases its power, given China’s century of humiliation (at foreign hands) historical narrative.

Taking Huawei off the entity list, which the administration now seems to be in the process of doing, does not, I think, return us to the status quo ante.  The barn door has already been opened.

 

So far as I can see, the US stock market has not reacted negatively to what I consider to be a collosal blunder.  Wall Street does continue to deal with the possibility of more tariffs principally, I think, by focusing on firms it sees to be the most immune–software, especially cloud-based, and potentially industry-transformative new market entrants in a variety of fields.

 

 

 

 

 

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.