Thursday, September 29, 2016

Trump's hair raising economic policy - Financial Times

It’s hard to take Donald Trump’s economic policy proposals seriously. Not just because it’s difficult to pin down what exactly they are. Not just because it’s unclear whether he would actually carry them out or is just trying to capture the voters’ attention. Above all, it’s hard to take them seriously because of the outrageous consequences that become apparent if we do.
A number of competent, independent economists have analysed parts of Trump’s policy proposals, so far as they can make them out, and modelled how the economy would be affected if he were to win and make good on his plans. The results are hair-raising.
Take Trump’s flagship policy of radically changing US trade relationships with the rest of the world. As a briefing by Peterson Institute economists sums up, he has threatened punitive tariffs on Mexican and Chinese imports (he has mooted rates of 35 and 45 per cent, respectively), and to unilaterally withdraw the US from major trade treaties. The Peterson economists have modelled the fallout for the US economy from the trade war that would probably ensue. The bottom line: the US would fall into recession and 4.8m private sector jobs would be lost. That’s about the same as the number of US factory jobs that disappeared in the decade after China joined the World Trade Organisation, the disruption that perhaps did most to create a constituency for Trump. While most of the jobs lost in the modelled scenario would be in the service sector, the largest proportional damage would, ironically, be in manufacturing, in particular in export-oriented capital goods production. (Read the Financial Times write-up of the analysis here.)
That’s just the beginning. Under a president Trump, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed but not ratified by the US, would be stillborn. (Hillary Clinton now says she is against the TPP as well, but her earlier wobbling on trade means the deal has a better prospect of surviving on her watch.) That would give up on the additional growth and jobs the TPP would create. Robert Lawrence, also at the Peterson Institute, has pointed out that while small in absolute terms, the TPP’s forecast boost to US GDP is equivalent to the return on $3tn of investment. It would also bring 128,000 more people into work than would otherwise be the case because wages would be higher. And while there would, as with any removal of economic inefficiencies, be losers, “the annual benefits from the TPP are likely to be between 12.3 and 114.5 times the costs”. More than enough, that is, to compensate the losers many times over. That would be the right policy; to jettison the TPP would be to forgo both the gains and the compensation.
Then there are the domestic policies. In his own words, Trump promises “tremendous” tax cuts. For once he’s not exaggerating. He proposes to reduce personal income tax rates, slash corporate tax rates and kill inheritance tax. That would blow a hole in the public finances. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has examined the two candidates’ tax plans, and calculates that Trump’s policies would add $5.3tn, or one-fifth of annual national income, to the federal debt by 2026 (and that is positively frugal compared with an earlier plan of his, which would have added $11.5tn). If nothing else, a president Trump would make the deficit great again. (Clinton’s plans, meanwhile, raise about as much in new taxes as they commit in new spending.)
Who would benefit? There is a lot of devil in the detail. The change to exemptions for dependants means that many families with children on low to middle earnings would end up paying more in tax than today. On corporate taxation, Trump boasts of getting rid of the disgrace of the “carried interest loophole”, which lets hedge fund managers pass off (more highly taxed) labour income as (much less taxed) capital income. It is true that the Trump tax plan closes this loophole. But he opens a bigger one by introducing an even lower tax rate on all business income, even earnings that are today counted as business owners’ personal income. That would allow hedgies and many other very high earners to pay even less than today’s capital tax rate.
In sum, the ones we can be most sure would benefit from all of Trump’s tax reforms are … Trump and his children.
Other readables
  • Diane Coyle writes on how the shift from analogue to digital information radically affects received norms of ownership and the efficiency of traditional ownership structures.
  • Reports of Opec’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The FT’s commodities team explains.
Numbers news
  • Lies, damned lies, and Japanese GDP numbers. Concerns about statistical flaws mean Japan’s economy may have been doing better than thought in recent years, and have sent officials on a hunt for better measures.
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Janet Yellen Should Stand Up to Donald Trump - TIME

Posted: 27 Sep 2016 12:46 PM PDT

There are many reasons that the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency worries me. I’ve outlined why his economic policy, for starters, is magical thinking. But after Monday’s debate, I have a new fear: I worry that if Trump were to be elected, Janet Yellen would resign from the Federal Reserve.
Trump’s comments last night that the “Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton” were not only unprecedented, they leave little room for a good working relationship. Indeed, the only person Trump has blamed as much as Hillary seems to be Yellen, whom he’s accused of keeping interest rates low for political reasons, and creating a bubble economy as a result.

The dangerous thing about Donald Trump, as I’ve explained in past columns, is that he embeds tiny nuggets of truth in a welter of lies. As I have been writing for years now, I think that the low interest rate policy of the last few years has created a disconnect between Wall Street valuations and the Main Street recovery. That’s what easy money is supposed to do: drive up risk appetite, raising the value of assets, with the hope that eventually the animal spirits will get the economy moving again.
For a variety of reasons, though, the money dump hasn’t worked as well or as fast this time (again, that’s not a criticism of the Fed—if it had not acted in the wake of the 2008 crisis, when President Obama was unable to pass more fiscal stimulus through a polarized Congress, the economy would have faltered). We’ve already seen corrections in emerging markets and commodities as the Fed pulled back on quantitative easing, and we’ll likely see more as rates ultimately rise.
Yellen herself worries about all of this. In fact, she keeps a careful eye on the balance between market risk and the risk that an early rate hike could derail the recovery. You can argue about the timing of when the Fed should (or should have) hiked rates. But nobody can argue that Yellen isn’t a data driven economist who’s looking at a variety of inputs while trying to make an unbiased decision about what’s best not for Wall Street, but for Main Street. (As she explained in a TIME cover story, she’s all about kitchen table economics.)
In fact, that’s a particular reason I worry about the possibility that Trump could drive such a competent person out of the Fed. With the recovery still fragile, it’s crucial to have a Fed chair right now that is most concerned with Main Street. I’m betting that anybody Trump would appoint to the Fed might actually keep rates lower, longer. After all, the people who benefit most from the current policy are investors like Trump himself, who can borrow huge sums at historically low rates and watch the value of their portfolios climb. Yellen has responded to Trump’s criticisms by saying that the “Fed isn’t politically compromised.” But one way to ensure the opposite would be for Trump to hound out a sitting Fed chair and appoint a lackey. Truly, I can’t think of anything more disastrous for the nation — or the world.
So, I’m calling on Yellen to stand up to what Hillary might call the “trumped up” charges of Fed politicization, and fight on, regardless of who wins in November. There is precedent. Chairman Marriner Eccles battled for Fed autonomy during the Truman administration. That fight led to the 1951 Fed/Treasury accord, which allowed the Fed to prioritize its own concerns about inflation over the then-President’s desire for a low-rate policy that would help the war effort.
This example couldn’t be more relevant today. The only reason that the Fed launched the unprecedented monetary policy of the last several years is that governments around the world were doing little-to-nothing to stop a new Great Depression. Trump should be lauding Janet Yellen (and Ben Bernanke) and the rest of the Fed governors for saving the markets when nobody else would. And he certainly shouldn’t try to falsely politicize the only institution in Washington that isn’t myriad in gridlock and anger.