“Bring Me Some Tariffs” New Trade Policies Offer Growth Boost—and Scare Economic Traditionalists

As President Trump talks more openly about aggressive action on the trade front to support the US economy, traditional economists and commentators, especially many on Wall Street, are raising the volume on a scare campaign, aimed at suggesting all sorts of imaginary negative consequences. They fail to recognize that persistent global trade imbalances, whereby trade surplus countries overproduce and excessively rely upon deficit countries’ consumers for growth, pose the most serious risk to global growth and economic stability.

Why Economists Can’t Connect Free Trade and Low Prices to Economic Growth

Economists in the US are overwhelmingly in favor of free trade. But they continue to be frustrated that the public doesn’t buy their arguments. So frustrated are they that last May, one of the leading pro-free-trade think tanks, the Peterson Institute, invited highly respected economist Alan Blinder, now a Princeton professor and formerly Federal Reserve Vice Chairman to give a talk on why the public doesn’t buy the free trade gospel.

High Tech Anxiety: Made in China 2025 Worries Industry, Government

The Trump administration’s rumored Section 301 investigation of Chinese trade practices opens up a new front in the ongoing “trade wars” with China, this time over intellectual property. A key event driving concern over Chinese use or abuse of foreign intellectual property was China’s publication of an ambitious industrial plan, known as Made in China 2025.