The Federal Reserve seems likely to continue raising rates into the foreseeable future making it a likely candidate for the ire of President Trump. The irony is that the President’s own trade policies likely make the Fed take actions to increase rates.
Continue reading Trade Policy, Fed Policy, and North Dakota
Over the last few weeks there were multiple calls to the radio show regarding the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate moves and where they are going. There is a general questioning of why the Fed is moving to raise rates now.
Continue reading The Fed and Normalization
Sometime tomorrow, or perhaps today depending on when I get this post completed, President Trump will announce tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Rather than engage in a knee jerk response that free trade is always the best approach I think it would pay to be a little more circumspect about the outcomes. First, is free trade beneficial to all parties? Well yes and no.
I resisted writing anything specific about Brexit and North Dakota for a time now. Part of the issue was it was all too soon; natural experiments of this scale are not something economists expect to just fall in their lap. There were many questions about the implications of the event for North Dakota, which as we will see is probably minimal in terms of direct relevance. With the benefit of a little temporal distance we can address this in a manner devoid of (some of) the immediate hysteria.