White House Trade and Manufacturing Policy Advisor Peter Navarro appears on CNN to debate economic policy with Jake Tapper. As customary Tapper attempts to use the Multinational Big AG talking points to identify farmers as victims.
♦The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note dropped to 1.623% Wednesday for less than one hour; momentarily below the 2-year bond rate of 1.634%. The cause was a rapid influx of foreign capital, mostly from the EU (due to negative interest rates), into the U.S. to secure a return. This is not comparable to the historic ‘bond rate inversion’.
♦The biggest fallacy pushed in this interview, YET AGAIN, surrounds price impacts on Chinese imports. Tapper takes the talking points of the Wall Street multinationals, and their paid think-tanks, to push an empirically false assertion of the U.S. consumer paying for tariffs on China. Here’s the easiest refutation of that nonsense:

  • The Steel (25%) and Aluminum (10%) tariffs have been in place for two years.
  • The 25% tariff on $250 billion Chinese goods have been in place over a full year.
  • The current inflation rate (Consumer Price Index) is only 1.4%.

(Bureau of Economic Analysis – Personal Income and Consumer Price Index)

If the tariffs on China were impacting consumers, inflation would be much higher. In fact the exact opposite is happening. Because the protectionist Chinese and EU currency manipulation hits *ALL* imports, including non-tariff products, we are actually importing deflation.



Share