US exports continue to grow despite dire predictions of the effects of Trump policies

Jack Hellner:
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece, "In America's Absence, the TPP Goes On," moaning how Trump's withdrawal from TPP has hurt exporters. But somehow it left out information about how total exports are actually doing. (It must be an innocent oversight and not based on any agenda.)

If the WSJ would look at actual total exports, the paper would see that they are up substantially year over year in every quarter of 2018 over 2017, and in 2017, they were up substantially over 2016 in every quarter.
So how exactly are exporters being hurt if total exports are continually up? Especially since the worldwide economy is slowing.

The WSJ predicted that Trump's trade policies and tariffs would harm the economy and cause higher inflation. Neither is true. The economy is growing faster than any time since 2005 and import price inflation for November 2018 versus 2017 was only 0.7%, lower than the overall rate inflation.

It seems that no matter what the facts are on trade and no matter how far off previous predictions were by the WSJ and others, the narrative remains the same.
...
Trump policies have continued to beat predictions of doom by economists and the media.  They appear to think he is defying gravity.   We should see even bigger growth in trade in the coming months as the infrastructure comes online to deliver Permian Basin oil to market.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains