Tariffs have caused rapid market swings, which could negatively impact investors.
“In addition to the deadweight economic losses caused by higher prices, Trump’s tariff policies have already provoked retaliation from abroad against American-produced goods. The erratic nature of his implementation has also wreaked havoc on the stock market by creating uncertainty over threats that American firms will soon be facing higher prices on key inputs such as steel and aluminum, or uncertainty about supply chains with key trading partners like Canada and Mexico,” Magness said.
James Pethokoukis says a word or two about Trump’s proposed policy of “reciprocal trade.”
U.S. Trade Representative nominee Jamieson Greer still doesn’t have a slot for a confirmation vote before the full Senate. Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, who Trump has said will lead the trade agenda, is likely to be confirmed this week, but likewise hasn’t been in office for the major trade decisions so far.
In their absence, a singular figure has risen as a leader of the trade agenda: Peter Navarro, the president’s special counselor on trade and manufacturing, known for his pugnacious personality and maximalist approach to tariffs.
[DBx: Those of you who continue to think – or hope – that Trump’s trade ‘policies’ aren’t really about protectionism but are instead clever strategies to bargain for this, that, or the other concession from foreign governments, pay attention to what Navarro says and realize that Trump chooses to seek counsel from this man. Navarro is an arch-protectionist with – despite his PhD in economics – absolutely no understanding of trade. Navarro simply reinforces Trump’s life-long naive mercantilist instincts.]
Remember being told that Joe Biden’s verbal slips were signs of normal aging? That rising crime was a figment of the public’s imagination, and chaos at the border was fabricated by MAGA Republicans?
Now the same tribunes of truth in the press proclaim that government fraud is a mirage—a pretext for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to bulldoze vital programs. Mr. Musk “offered no evidence for his sweeping claims” that officials “had approved money for ‘fraudsters,’” the New York Times reported on Feb. 11
Who are you going to believe? Reporters at the New York Times or other reporters at the New York Times?
On Friday the Times reported that a Nevada woman pleaded guilty to filing more than 1,200 tax returns “to fraudulently claim Covid-19 tax credits of nearly $100 million.” She allegedly “used the money to gamble at casinos, take vacations and buy luxury cars” and purchase “designer clothing from Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Louis Vuitton.”
My GMU Econ colleague Pete Boettke talks with Russ Roberts about the socialist-calculation debate.
Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker reports that “illiberalism is suffocating Europe.” A slice:
It took a certain chutzpah for Vice President JD Vance to lecture European leaders last weekend about their subversion of the old Continent’s democracy. This from a man who endorses his boss’s attempt to overturn the result of a legitimate presidential election, who lambastes restrictions on free speech in Britain but apparently can’t find anything bad to say about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and whose administration, on the day Mr. Vance upbraided his hosts in Munich, was using the criminal justice system back home to blackmail the mayor of New York City into supporting its policies. The effect was a little like listening to Al Capone admonishing an associate for filing his tax return late.
But hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, and just because Mr. Vance smiles at his own team’s trashing of democratic institutions and norms doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the state of European liberalism. The examples he cited of oppressive elites stifling opposition to their hegemony are valid and troubling. The way the law has been used, in the U.K. especially, to intimidate and punish dissent against the prevailing cultural and political order is disturbing.
Jon Miltimore applauds the successes of Javier Milei.
Eric Boehm reports on some trends in the U.S.
In late 2021, Charlotte Bellis, an unmarried journalist from New Zealand, found herself pregnant while working in Qatar, a country where that status carries the risk of jail time or deportation. A doctor advised her to get married or get out of the country. But New Zealand, which at that point still was taking drastic measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, allowed its citizens to come home only if they secured lottery-allocated spots in a government-run quarantine program. Bellis applied but was unsuccessful. Desperate, she turned to the Taliban.
The Islamic fundamentalist group said yes. Bellis made her way to Afghanistan, where she had worked and where her boyfriend was based. “When the Taliban offers you—a pregnant, unmarried woman—safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” she wrote in The New Zealand Herald in January 2022.
Bellis continued to ask the New Zealand government for permission to return home, concerned about the risks of giving birth in Afghanistan, but it kept turning her down. Only after New Zealand’s largest newspaper publicized her story did the government change course.
When the World Closed Its Doors, by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Edward Alden and Border Policy Research Institute Director Laurie Trautman, is filled with stories like this, which remind readers of the absurd measures governments took to prevent the spread of COVID-19 across borders. These policies were ostensibly directed outward, targeting foreigners. But as is often the case with border controls, they inflicted damage internally too, infringing on citizens’ rights and going hand in hand with domestic restrictions.
GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller warns that “DEI grifters and grievance peddlers” are still on the scene.
