by Dan Mitchell | Feb 23, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Trade
Early last year, I shared a video explaining that trade deficits generally don’t matter. I even suggested trade deficits might be a sign of economic strength because foreigners who earned dollars were anxious to invest them in the American economy. I’m recycling this...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 2, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Trade
At the beginning of the Trump era, many of us (including me) warned that his statements on trade were nonsensical. And when Trump shifted from bad rhetoric to bad policy, Johan Norberg pointed out why trade wars are very misguided. As you might expect, Johan is...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 1, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Trade
Yesterday’s column was my annual end-of-year round-up of the best and worst developments of the concluding year. Today I’ll be forward looking and give you my hopes and fears for the new year, which is a newer tradition that began in 2017 (and continued...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 31, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Government Spending, Trade
Time for my annual column highlighting the “Best” and “Worst” policy developments of the year, a tradition I sort of started in 2012 and definitely did in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. I’m trying to be a glass-half-full kind of guy, so we’ll start with the...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 16, 2019 | Blogs, Trade
One of my big 2018 worries was that Trump would wreck NAFTA. We dodged that bullet, but my two cents is that the new deal is underwhelming. The bottom line is that his revisions to the pact – which is now called USMCA – create some new barriers to trade. But there...
