(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Is Trump Finally Getting It on NAFTA?

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automotive, Bill Clinton, Canada, Inside U.S. Trade, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Politico, Ronald Reagan, rules of origin, tariffs, Trade, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s still unconfirmed, but if true, a development reported in the (usually reliable) newsletter Inside U.S. Trade would reveal that the Trump administration is finally recognizing a major weakness in its approach to revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And special bonus – the proposal in question would also go far toward solving the trade problems with China and most of the rest of the world that have been rightly identified by the administration.

Here’s a good summary of the scoop provided Tuesday by Politico:

“Three sources close to the [NAFTA] talks said the U.S. has demanded that Mexico, and possibly Canada, accept a higher tariff rate for autos that don’t meet the pact’s new content rules. That would essentially force companies that build cars in Mexico to agree to have exports to the U.S. that don’t conform to the rule be subject to a tariff beyond the 2.5 percent rate Washington bound itself to at the World Trade Organization. USTR [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] also declined to confirm this development….”

The key here is the point about higher tariffs. The three NAFTA signatories have now come to agree that the treaty’s regional content rules need to be made more strict. So far, in order to qualify for tariff-free treatment anywhere inside North America, autos and light trucks (which comprise an outsized share of intra-North American trade, and have attracted the most attention in the talks) need to be made of 62.5 percent North American parts and components. The aim, at least ostensibly, has been to encourage producers outside North America to relocate production and jobs inside the free trade zone.

The Trump administration has been pressing to raise the content levels needed for such tariff-free treatment to at least 70 percent for passenger vehicles, and reportedly Mexico is now on board in principle (though the exact number has yet to be agreed on). But so far, the administration has not demonstrated much, if any, awareness that higher mandated local content levels alone won’t bring many new factories or jobs to the signatory countries – and have under-performed on this front so far – for a very simple reason. As I’ve noted repeatedly, the penalty that non-North American producers need to pay for non-compliance is only 2.5 percent – an extra cost they can easily absorb.

The Inside U.S. Trade item suggests that this point has been taken, which would be great news for all three NAFTA countries if the eternal tariff is raised high enough to foster North American production and discourage imports. Even better, this proposal – which would essentially turn North America into a genuine trade bloc if extended to all traded goods and services – would by definition limit American imports from all the countries long regarded in Washington as troublesome trade partners (like China, Germany, and Japan). For they would all find it much more difficult to supply the United States – along with Canada and Mexico – with exports, and would face great pressure to serve North American customers instead with products overwhelmingly made in the free trade zone by North American workers.

It’s true that an increase in the external NAFTA tariff would violate WTO rules and would therefore expose all three North American economies to retaliation from outside the continent. But all three countries have run chronic trade deficits with the rest of the world, so they stand to come out ahead if a full-fledged trade conflict actually resulted. And as former President Ronald Reagan emphasized when he originally broached the subject (back in 1979), North America is self-sufficient, or could easily become so, in every significant product or service used by a prosperous economy.

Indeed, Reagan subsequently and explicitly contended that NAFTA was needed as a trade bloc to fend off the challenges posed by regional consolidation in Europe and East Asia. (The Wall Street Journal article in which this argument was made is now behind a pay wall, but the quote is found in my Marketwatch.com op-ed linked above.)  So did former President Bill Clinton. Both were known – and rightly so – as free trade supporters. Donald Trump, a decided free trade skeptic, should settle for no less.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Tariff-Induced Carnage in U.S. Metals-Using Manufacturing is Still MIA

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appliances, automotive, durable goods, fabricated metal products, Federal Reserve, industrial production, machinery, manufacturing, metals tariffs, metals-using industries, tariffs, Trade, Trump, washing machines, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The July figures for after-inflation U.S. manufacturing production came in this morning from the Federal Reserve, and they further debunk widespread reports that President Trump’s tariff-heavy trade policies – and particular his levies on steel and aluminum imports – are backfiring badly by decimating metals-using manufacturing sectors that dwarf the steel and aluminum makers.

Let’s first look at the monthly numbers, and compare the (preliminary) real growth of major metals-using sectors and manufacturing overall from June to July:

overall manufacturing:  +0.31 percent

durable goods:   +0.39 percent

fab metals:  -0.03 percent

machinery:  +0.56 percent

automotive:  +0.94 percent

small appliances:  -1.41 percent

major appliances:  -4.56 percent

Clearly, most metals-using sectors actually outperformed overall, with the top exceptions being appliance makers. Those in the major appliance category, of course, have been hit not only with the metals tariffs, but with safeguard tariffs on one of their actual products – large residential laundry machines.

Moreover, the output data since the advent of the first metals tariffs – in late March – show that the metals-using sectors in general have at least held their own. Here are the inflation-adjusted output percentage changes since April; they include the initially reported numbers through June (released by the Fed last month), and the revised June and initial July figures (released this morning).

                                                       old thru June   new thru June    new thru July

overall manufacturing                     – 0.21                +0.06                 +0.25

durables manufacturing                    -0.05               +0.09                  +0.48

fabricated metals products               +0.90               +0.82                 +0.79

machinery                                         -0.75                -0.47                  +0.09

automotive                                        -0.68                -1.56                   -0.63

small appliances                               -3.31                -3.98                   -5.33

major appliances                              -3.16                -0.73                    -5.25

Although the results for the very large machinery and automotive sectors look worse than the overall manufacturing numbers at first glance, they’ve each been undermined by some one-off developments.

In machinery, as reported here last month, the subpar post-April constant dollar growth clearly reflects some giveback from a big production jump between March and April. This increase was initially reported as a 2.27 percent surge, and it was estimated this morning at a still impressive 2.21 percent.

In automotive, production is still recovering from the effects of a fire in early May at a factory that produced parts for a popular Ford pickup truck, and which depressed after-inflation output that month by a huge 8.52 percent.

The post-April numbers confirm that both appliance sectors continue to be the big tariff losers, but the rest of the data show that they’ve been the exceptions, not the rule.

As usual with data, “past performance does not guarantee future results.” But the new Fed figures (along with comparable employment figures I’ve reported) also make clear that, so far, claims of major tariff-induced losses for domestic metals-using manufacturing belong in the realm of speculation, not of facts.

Making News: Hits on Breitbart.com, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette…& More!

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Apple Inc., Breitbart.com, China, Gordon Chang, Jobs, John Carney, Len Boselovic, Making News, manufacturing, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Daily Beast, The John Batchelor Show, Trade, trade wars, wages

Time to summarize some recent media appearances!

Yesterday, in a post on a new New York Federal Reserve study on U.S. trade flows, John Carney of Breitbart.com cited my own analysis of this bizarre report. Here’s the link.

Also yesterday, Len Boselovic’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette analysis of the latest developments in manufacturing wages cited my findings about how hourly pay in industry has lost its leadership status in the U.S. economy.

On Saturday, August 11, TheDailyBeast.com ran Gordon Chang’s latest article on U.S.-China trade relations, which quoted me on the possibility of new pressure on Apple, Inc. from the Chinese government.

Finally, on July 30, I made a short-notice appearance on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show to discuss the latest developments in the U.S.’ trade confrontation with China. Here’s a link to the podcast of the segment, which experienced some technical difficulties because John was calling in from Azerbaijian!

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Mainstream Media Trade Coverage that’s a Public Service

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{What's Left of) Our Economy, China, Trade, agriculture, exports, tariffs, Washington Post, Trump, trade war, Meg Kelly, soybeans, Heidi Heitkamp

The Mainstream Media is so often accused these days by President Trump and others (sometimes rightly) of propagating “fake news” that it seems only fair to point out an important example of such news organizations fighting fake news: a Washington Post article yesterday exposing the phoniness underlying key claims that the Trump administration’s tariff-heavy China policies either have nothing to do with the woes being experienced lately by America’s soybean farmers, or that they’ve already devastated cultivators of this key crop.

At first glance it seems odd that the fate of soybeans growers has moved to center stage in the China trade debate. It’s true that this crop has become America’s second-leading export to China, and that a huge share (25 percent) of the annual U.S. harvest has relied on the Chinese market. At the same time, it’s hard to think of a time since the Great Depression Dust Bowl when America’s leading journalists paid nearly this much attention to American farmers.

As the Post‘s Meg Kelly (unsurprisingly, in my view) noted, President Trump got it wrong when he responded to soybean-focused critiques of his China trade policies by contending that “Farmers have been on a downward trend for 15 years. The price of soybeans has fallen 50% since 5 years before the Election. A big reason is bad (terrible) Trade Deals with other countries.”

In all fairness, though, soybean prices did begin sinking dramatically in mid 2012 – more than four years before he was even elected President.

More noteworthy, given the rash of soybean stories and widespread fears of soy-mageddon, was Kelly’s debunking of a claim by North Dakota Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp (also communicated by tweet) that “A study shows that corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the U.S. have already lost $13 billion because of the administration’s trade war. We need trade policies that make sense for North Dakota, protect farmers and ranchers, and open up markets.”

Thanks to Kelly, we now know that there was no such study – or even close. Let’s allow the author’s words show how flimsy this claim really was:

“When the [Post] asked to see the study, Heitkamp’s office pointed us to an op-ed from the National Farmers Union that was referenced in a New York Times article. But the National Farmers Union said the calculation was not its work. Instead, it said, it obtained the factoid from a quote in an article in the Wall Street Journal.”

Kelly further explains that the source of the quote was eminently respectable – an agricultural economist from Purdue University. But she also made painfully clear how shoddy his methodology was: His soybean crop loss estimates never distinguished between the impact of tariffs and the impact of weather. That’s like a sportswriter examining an athlete’s performance and never disclosing whether he or she plays for a good or a bad team.

But the importance of Kelly’s diligent reporting goes far beyond soybeans, or even trade. For Heitkamp-type sleights of hand take place in the American political and policy world’s all the time. Here’s another example, reported here about a year ago, about the popular meme that the beneficiaries of former President Obama’s “Dream Act” granting amnesty to many illegal immigrant children brought to this country by their parents were an unusually well educated group – and that therefore, revoking their amnesty would backfire on an economy that urgently needed highly knowledgeable workers.

Heitkamp, however, deserves some credit for taking down her misleading tweet. President Trump hasn’t – which is disappointing since, as made clear above, and is so often the case, he could have made a completely valid point by displaying just a moderately greater respect for accuracy.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The New York Fed Whiffs on Tariffs and Trade Policy

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China, currency manipulation, imports, intermediate goods, New York Fed, non-tariff barriers, subsidies, tariffs, Trade, Trade Deficits, Trump, Trump tariffs, value-added tax, VAT, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Do you want to know how slipshod a new post from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve on tariffs and trade deficits is? I’m not a Ph.D. economist, and it took me about thirty seconds to spot no less than four fatal flaws.

The post, written by a senior Fed economist and three academic colleagues (including one from a Chinese university), argues that President Trump’s tariff-heavy trade policies are likeliest to backfire on the administration and the entire U.S. economy by widening, not narrowing, the country’s trade deficit. Their main evidence? The experience of China after it entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of 2001.

According to the authors:

“While more costly imports are likely to reduce the quantity and value of imports into the United States, the story does not stop there, because we cannot presume that the value of exports will remain unchanged. In this post, we argue that U.S. exports will also fall, not only because of other countries’ retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, but also because the costs for U.S. firms producing goods for export will rise and make U.S. exports less competitive on the world market. The end result is likely to be lower imports and lower exports, with little or no improvement in the trade deficit.”

The Chinese example, they claim, supports this hypothesis because China significantly reduced its tariffs following WTO entry (i.e., pursued a policy exactly the opposite of that sought by Mr. Trump), and both its exports as well as its imports soared. Moreover, the authors found that

“Focusing on China’s exports to the United States…shows that by lowering its own tariffs on imported inputs, China reduced its production costs and increased productivity, enabling Chinese firms to enter the U.S. export market and compete with other firms. With a fall in production costs, Chinese firms charged lower prices on goods exported to the United States and increased their U.S. market shares.”

But the weaknesses in this analysis are positively jaw-dropping. First, the data supporting that latter key finding is no less than a dozen years out of date.

Second, the post completely fails to take into account the possible effects over time of a U.S. failure to provide trade protection for sectors, like steel, that represent key inputs for manufacturing. Although obviously the cheaper they are, the more competitive the industries that utilize them will be, intermediate goods sectors (including not only materials like metals but machinery and equipment of all kinds) could represent as much as nearly half of America’s entire manufacturing complex. Should the United States just sit back and watch those sectors trashed by foreign competition?

Third, and even more important, should the United States accept this result if much of the foreign competition faced by its manufacturers is predatory? In this vein, the Fed post contains not a single word about China’s currency manipulation – which kept the value of the yuan significantly and artificially suppressed throughout the early post-WTO admission years (and arguably still does) for reasons completely unrelated to trade liberalization, and which gave Chinese products a major and wholly artificial advantage in China’s own market, the U.S. market, and markets around the world.

Fourth, the authors similarly ignore the impact of China’s value-added tax (VAT) system, which not only surrounds the entire Chinese economy with high, tariff-like walls that nonetheless aren’t technically considered tariffs, but which provides comparably impressive subsidies for China’s exports.  Not to mention the other massive supports Beijing offers to manufacturing, or its still (and perhaps increasingly) formidable array of non-tariff trade barriers.

Indeed, all these non-market practices no doubt largely explain why China has both supercharged its exports since it entered the WTO and impressively raised the levels of Chinese inputs they contain. 

In baseball, three strikes means “you’re out.” At the New York Fed, by contrast, four strikes apparently earns a “well done.”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: China Trade Derangement Syndrome Strikes Again

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Bloomberg.com, China, Mainstream Media, Michael Schuman, tariffs, Trade, Trade Derangement Syndrome, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m sure that there have been more stunning examples than provided by Michael Schuman yesterday on Bloomberg.com of a writer unwittingly devastating the very argument he’s seeking to make. But even in the fields of trade and globalization policy analysis, which have demonstrated an unusual power to turn otherwise working brains into neural oatmeal, I’m equally sure they’d be hard to find.

Schuman, a well regarded Beijing-based journalist and student of China and its relations with the United States, sought to show that both Americans and Chinese could come to regret deeply any policy or policies that produce a result he views as alarmingly likely – an unwinding of the thick web of economic ties created in recent decades between them.

Strangely, the author does a good job of explaining why the bilateral relationship has benefited China, correctly observing that “Open access to the U.S. market has been a cornerstone of China’s growth since the 1980s.”

Indeed, he goes on to point out that: “No ambitious Chinese company could claim to be truly global without a U.S. presence”;

>that “Restricted access to the U.S. would force Chinese and foreign companies to reorder their supply chains in a host of sectors, from electronics to clothing to toys, dealing a serious blow to Chinese manufacturing”;

>and that losing share of the U.S. market “would also dent China’s hopes of becoming a global hub for cutting-edge products. Without competitive access to the American market, at least some of the capacity that could’ve been built in China would have to be located elsewhere.”

But it’s precisely because the costs to China would be so great that his claim of comparable losses for the United States is so weird. Specifically, if China can’t rely on selling much to Americans, is it really reasonable to expect its share of global middle class spending to surge, as Schuman expects, and to become a titanic new market that could be denied to U.S. business?

If American trade restrictions prevent Chinese entities (I resist calling them “companies” or “businesses” because they have nothing in common with commercial organizations originating in national economies dominated by market forces) from becoming genuinely global players, including in high tech sectors; if they cause worldwide supply chains to start leaving or skipping China; and if China’s growth therefore is seriously slowed, where are all those new Chinese middle class consumers supposed to come from?

Similarly, if such trade curbs can crimp Chinese entities’ ambitions to invest in the United States and elsewhere abroad, then it’s implausible to think that the American economy could lose out to other economic competitors on much in the way of new capital inflows from China. (And that’s of course assuming that Americans should even want China’s state-controlled economy to create a major footprint in their own.)

This latest version of Trade Derangement Syndrome doesn’t stop with these internally contradictory claims. For example, Schuman also speculates that, if U.S.-China economic ties wither, the PRC’s continued rise to major power status might not remain so peaceful, and that “outright conflict could become more likely.” Evidently, he’s unaware that it burgeoning integration with the American economy has not only made China more prosperous, but strong enough militarily to start challenging the U.S. position in the East Asia-Pacific region.

But the author’s inability even to recognize these clashing positions, much less attempt to reconcile them, deserves special attention because they show how little genuine scrutiny trade and globalization cheerleading receives either from the policy community that generates it, or the mainstream media that showcases so much of it.

Democracy, one of America’s leading newspapers has taken to warning, “dies in darkness.” But given the importance of a truly free marketplace of ideas, and the central role that the mainstream media is supposed to play in fostering such exchange, it’s also clear that democracy can die from intolerance and groupthink, and from the intellectual arrogance and laziness it encourages.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The China Trade Cheerleaders Make their Failures Painfully Clear

Tags

Bill Clinton, Bob Davis, Charlene Barshefsky, China, Financial Crisis, Global Imbalances, Great Recession, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

This is how abysmal America’s pre-Trump China policies were: Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis recently gave supporters of China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) ample opportunity to defend their positions on this landmark decision. And what were the most convincing rejoinders they could muster to claims that the benefits of WTO membership (chiefly, legally sheltering China from unilateral U.S. responses to its wide array of predatory trade practices) enabled China’s rise as a dangerous economic and military power – and that American trade policy needs to respond vigorously? Observations that the biggest gains have indeed flowed to China.

According to Davis, WTO admission advocates “can point to real gains from integrating China into the global economy. According to the World Bank, some 400 million Chinese have been lifted from extreme poverty—that is, from living on less than $1.90 a day—since 1999.”

In addition, “After the deal, foreign investment in Beijing mushroomed from $47 billion in 2001 to $124 billion a decade later. The lower investment and import restrictions required of China as part of its WTO entry also encouraged multinationals to rush in, as did the prospect of serving the vast Chinese market. China became the world’s manufacturing floor, and Chinese imports [sic] to the U.S. soared.”

Evidently, the WTO admission supporters tried to identify benefits for the United States, too. For example, “Today, technology companies tap the Chinese market to boost profits and defray research costs.” And “The low inflation associated with cheap imports, together with Chinese purchases of U.S. government bonds, has also helped to hold down interest rates, making it cheaper for Americans to buy not only clothes and electronics but also homes and cars.”

But apparently none could point to evidence of U.S. companies’ China earnings trickling down to the American domestic economy and its workers. Indeed, the reference to “defraying research costs” looks like a euphemistic way of describing how these businesses often moved white collar and professional as well as blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China.

Similarly, the low inflation and interest rate points amount to gushing that China’s WTO membership helped enable Americans to live way beyond their means. On that score, the only sane U.S. response should be “thanks but no thanks” – since the result was a decade of bubbles whose inevitable bursting triggered the terrifying global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession.

The unprecedented bubble decade global trade imbalances fostered by the WTO’s enabling of China’s mercantilism, and their nearly cataclysmic results, also provide vital context to claims (chiefly by former U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky) that China “became the world’s second-largest importer, giving a boost to rich and poor nations alike.” For these imports and their growth were clearly dwarfed by China’s export surge. And although China’s post-2009 spending spree did help “the global economy from tumbling even more deeply into recession,” it’s unquestionable that the “kitchen sink” stimulus from the Federal Reserve and other major central banks played a far more important role.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence offered in Davis’ article for the abject failure of the China WTO decision came from former President Bill Clinton – who led the campaign to support Chinese membership by promising both an economic boom for U.S. exporters and irresistible pressure for a democratization of China that would bring more global peace and freedom. As Davis reports, the normally loquacious Clinton “declined to comment for this article.”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Metals Tariffs Coverage has Just (Again) Been Exposed as Largely Fake News

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ABC News, aluminum, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, durable goods, Financial Times, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marketwatch.com, metals, metals-using industries, NBC News, PBS, private sector, Reuters, steel, tariffs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In case you still think that President Trump’s charges of fake news-peddling by the national news media are fake news themselves, consider this: For the second time in two months, if you decided to hold your breath till you found a Mainstream Media item reporting that the America’s metals-using industries have been major job-creation leaders, not laggards, you’d have died.

Such omissions are especially important because since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (in March), the media has been filled not only with predictions of massive employment and production losses in metals-using manufacturing (because the prices of two noteworthy inputs for these industries was bound to rise), but with accounts of actual economic damage that numerous companies in these sectors have already suffered. (See here and here for just two examples.) 

Last month, I noted that, for all these accounts, authoritative government data (through June) showed that the metals-using industries’ performance by both measures had both generally improved, and had indeed both generally improved more than job creation and output in the rest of manufacturing.

Since then, more steel and aluminum tariffs were put in place (mainly because some major U.S. trade partners initially exempted from the tariffs were subjected to the levies). And what did we learn from the newest jobs report, which was released last Friday, and took the story through July (on a preliminary basis)? That the metals-using industries continue to set the national job-creation pace for the entire economy, not simply for manufacturing.

Here are the percentage gains for employment in some major sectors of the economy from April (the first month during which any metals tariffs effects would have been felt) through July except for the industries noted:

entire private sector: +0.53 percent

overall manufacturing: +0.73 percent

durable goods: +0.96 percent

fabricated metals products: +1.10 percent

non-electrical machinery: +1.43 percent

automotive vehicles & parts: +1.06 percent

household appliances (thru June): -0.63 percent

aerospace products & parts (thru June): +1.05 percent

Unfortunately, it was not possible to learn any of this from America’s leading news organizations. For these figures were completely ignored.

To their credit, some leading media mentioned that Trump tariffs and trade war fears in general seemed to be having no effect on manufacturing job creation overall despite industry’s exposure in principle to the fall-out. These included the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, ABC News, and NBC News. Yet the metals-using sectors were never mentioned.

As for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CBS News, they made no connection of the tariff/trade war-manufacturing job connection whatever.

And several news organizations actually tried to rationalize the unexpected results. Reuters, for example, claimed that “With manufacturing payrolls increasing by the most in seven months, the moderation in hiring reported by the Labor Department on Friday likely does not reflect the rising trade tensions between the United States and other nations including China.”

According to PBS, “Economists say it is too early to tell whether the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are having a significant effect on manufacturing jobs.”

Bloomberg and Marketwatch.com weren’t as disingenuous, but still felt compelled to contend that rising trade tensions continued to cast a long shadow on the job markets’ future – without reporting that, if anything, new U.S. policies and statements were so far having exactly the opposite effect on parts of the economy most exposed to existing metals tariffs.

But no account of press coverage of these Trump trade policies would be complete without observing an equally weird development: Neither the President nor anyone else in his administration has pointed to the outperformance of the metals-using industries, either.

In a little over a week, the nation will get its next major opportunity to gauge the impact of metals and other tariffs, and future possibilities thereof – when the Federal Reserve releases the July industrial production data, which includes detailed statistics on inflation-adjusted manufacturing output. Will the Mainstream Media finally zero in on the sectors where the tariff rubber hits the road? At this rate, Americans should be grateful if they simply ended the string of job loss and other Chicken Little metals tariff impact stories.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Real Trade Messages of the New GDP Report

Tags

exports, GDP, Great Recession, gross domestic product, imports, inflation-adjusted growth, Made in Washington trade deficit, real exports, real imports, real trade deficit, recovery, tariffs, Trade, Trade Deficits, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Friday’s government report on U.S. economic growth in the second quarter of this year was a treasure trove of newsworthy information. It not only provided the first peak at how President Trump’s imposed and threatened tariffs have affected the nation’s economic performance. It also incorporated literally decades’ worth of revisions that contained some important surprises about the economy’s strengths and weaknesses – in particular over the last five years. These new findings entail considerably more than trade, but let’s focus on that subject for today, since it’s been making so many headlines.

As widely expected, these new figures on the gross domestic product (GDP) and how it changed in inflation-adjusted terms showed that the threatened tariffs and retaliatory levies boosted American exports significantly. The reason? Many foreign customers for U.S. goods decided to “front-load” their purchases to avoid the paying the new charges for as long as possible.

On a sequential basis, this first of this year’s three estimates for the second quarter judged that U.S. merchandise exports jumped by 8.96 percent on an annualized basis. That’s the biggest such increase since the 11.72 percent surge in the fourth quarter of 2013. At the same time, the contribution to total quarterly growth made by goods exports was nothing special. In fact, at 1.12 percentage points out of the quarter’s 4.10 percent annualized rate of inflation-adjusted expansion, they fueled less real growth relatively speaking than they did in the fourth quarter of last year, when they were responsible for 0.79 percentage points of that period’s 2.30 percent annualized constant dollar growth.

Interestingly, the tariffs didn’t result in U.S. customers of overseas producers displaying the same interest in maximizing their imports to the greatest possible extent. Indeed, these purchases inched up sequentially by only 0.12 percent at an annual rate after inflation. Yet at $3.4241 trillion after inflation and annualized, they set a new record, nosing out the previous quarter’s $3.4201 trillion.

Thanks to exports’ performance, which brought their quarterly total to a new record ($2.5742 trillion annualized in real terms) as well, the inflation-adjusted trade deficit plummeted by 23.27 percent annualized to $849.9 billion. (The absolute numbers are different from those reported in previous RealityChek posts because the new GDP report is presenting the inflation-adjusted figures using 2012 dollars, not 2009 dollars.) That quarterly trade shortfall was the nation’s smallest since the $845.9 billion annualized recorded in the third quarter of last year. And the sequential decrease was the biggest since the 36.96 percent nosedive in the fourth quarter of 2013.

In addition, according to the revisions, America’s trade performance between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the second quarter of this year was considerably worse than previously estimated. Combined goods and services exports rose a bit faster (at a 2.6 percent rather than a 2.5 percent average annual pace in real terms). But total import growth was much stronger during this period – a 4.2 percent average annual increase in constant dollars rather than 3.7 percent growth.

Trade deficits have therefore been higher than previously judged. Again, the changeover from reporting the figures in 2009 dollars to using 2012 dollars makes comparing the old and new levels pointless. But the difference can become clear by examining these deficits as a share of the total economy. Here are the previously reported percentages:

2013: 2.59 percent

2014: 2.67 percent

2015: 3.31 percent

2016: 3.51 percent

2017: 3.64 percent

And here are the revised data:

2013: 3.23 percent

2014: 3.42 percent

2015: 4.17 percent

2016: 4.45 percent

2017: 4.76 percent

Last year’s level was the highest for any year since 2007’s 5.27 percent – just before the Great Recession struck. It’s still a far cry from the historic quarterly high of 6.10 percent, set in the fourth quarter of 2005. But the trend shows that the real trade deficit has been climbing steadily toward these heights.

In fact, during the first quarter of this year, the overall real trade deficit hit 4.92 percent of GDP, before falling back to 4.59 percent in the second.

The revised GDP figures also shed new light on trade’s drag on economic growth during this sluggish recovery. Before this revision, the increase in the constant dollar trade deficit since the expansion began, in the middle of 2009, had sliced $302.1 billion off of the economy’s cumulative inflation-adjusted growth through the second read on first quarter GDP. That amounted to a trade drag of 9.99 percent.

With the revision in place, the trade drag as of the first quarter’s final read was $457.2 billion – or 14.33 percent. The decline in the price-adjusted trade gap as of Friday’s first read on second quarter GDP pushed the drag down to twelve percent. But that figure still represented $404.7 billion in lost real growth.

The growth drag created by the increase in the Made in Washington trade deficit has been much bigger. Before the new GDP revision, the growth of this trade shortfall (which is comprised of constant-dollar trade flows heavily affected by trade policy and trade agreement, and therefore leaves out trade in oil and services) had cut cumulative recovery era growth by 17.37 percent in real terms, or $523.88 billion, as of the final first quarter figures.

It won’t be possible to calculate revised figures for the first quarter and new figures for the second quarter until this Friday, when we’ll get the next monthly trade report (for June).

Making News: A New York City Radio Podcast — & More!

Tags

AM 970 The Answer, automotive, European Union, Frank Morano, Lifezette.com, Making News, Memphis Commercial Appeal, tariffs, Ted Evanoff, The Joe Piscopo Show, Trade, trade war, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my latest appearance on “The Joe Piscopo Show” on New York City’s AM 970 “The Answer” radio station. Unfortunately, the invite was too last minute to preview here, but luckily all you need to do to listen to a great discussion (with guest host Frank Morano) about where we stand currently with President Trump’s “trade wars” and their impact is click on to this link.  My segment comes on at about the 22:25 mark.

On July 26, my skepticism about the new trade agreement between Mr. Trump and the European Union was reported in this post on Lifezette.com. Click onto this post to read about the subject in more detail.

Also, it was great to be quoted on the possibility of Trump auto tariffs by in Ted Evanoff’s July 25 article on the subject in the Memphis (Tennessee) Commercial Appeal. Ted, incidentally, is a journalist who’s become a genuine expert on this topic. His 2010 book on the American automotive industry’s struggles to overcome the last recession and deeper rooted challenges is an absolute must for anyone interested in manufacturing and trade issues.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.