Friday’s well-received jobs report aside, this hasn’t been a good week for the economy. After 107 months, we are beginning to see the imbalance — in popular-speak, the bubble — that will eventually end this expansion. And its name is Donald J. Trump.
You see it in Wednesday’s report on gross domestic product that showed first-quarter pretax corporate profits declining, even as Trump’s tax cuts papered over the erosion.
You can see it in the weak consumer-spending growth in the first quarter, also reported Wednesday, and the not-great housing news (lower pending sales, and big price gains even amid weak volumes, because sellers are simply sitting out trade-up moves, forcing buyers to bid up scarce inventory) that came out Tuesday and Thursday.
You see it in market wobbles early in the week prompted by worries about Italy maybe trying to wriggle out of its unmanageable debt load — a reminder that if a financial crisis comes out of Europe, just as one came from Asia in 1998 and from the U.S. housing market a decade ago, the U.S. president and his team haven’t shown even basic competence, let alone the ability to deal anything like a global response to a global problem.
Or in the fact that, if you look, this report delivered fewer jobs than 25 of the 48 issued in Barack Obama’s second term. Yet, predictable as Seattle rain, Trump took to Twitter and declared “RECORD JOBS DAY!...America is WINNING BIG under President Trump!”
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And you see it in the president himself — more every day.
In the past week, Trump has decided to play trade warrior, slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum made by allies in Europe and Canada — all taken vainly in the name of national security. (What, was Justin Trudeau going to drop ingots on Trump’s head, Road Runner-style?). Forget for a moment that steel imports in general are way below 2014 levels, though they rose in the first year of Trump’s term, or that total steel imports were only $29 billion for all of last year, while exports rose 15% in the first nine months of 2017 to $10.1 billion.
Putting it charitably, Trump is ticking off allies — Trudeau’s contempt was palpable as he pointed out the U.S. has a trade surplus in steel with Canada and said the move lacked “common sense,” while French President Emmanuel Macron warned Trump that “economic nationalism leads to war” — over tariffs on about $20 billion, or one-tenth of 1% of the U.S. economy.
Trade was always the heart of economists’ case that Trump would cause a recession after the effects of his tax cuts wore off. If Thursday was kabuki theater because it affected only one smallish (if culturally potent) industry, the main act may still be coming.
“If all of the announced tariffs are actually implemented, it will [cut] 0.2% from real GDP growth. If that’s all it is, it won’t cause much of a slowdown,” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said. “However, if the trade war is back on, and the Trump Administration slaps 25% tariffs on all Chinese and Mexican exports to the U.S., as [Trump] promised during the campaign, then yes, it would do serious economic damage. NAFTA would likely fall apart, and financial markets would begin discounting much worse. A recession would be a real possibility.”
Anyone think Trump’s odd behavior isn’t accelerating? That this doesn’t raise the odds that he will do things he wants to do, like bag NAFTA? Anyone think that won’t have a price at some point?
Consider how he’s spent the last few days.
He welcomed parents of kids murdered in the Houston-area school shooting that took eight lives, one of whom said Trump’s repetition and harping on arming teachers to stop school massacres “was like talking to a toddler.” He pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, longtime promoter of the lie that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born terrorist sympathizer and a conscious violator of campaign-finance laws who the day before the pardon was on Twitter promoting the “idea” that George Soros, then a small Jewish child in Hungary, was somehow the Boss Baby helping Hitler run the Holocaust.
Or consider Bloomberg’s scoop that Trump wants to order utility grid managers to buy more power from financially failing coal plants — despite the fact that coal has been losing market share for years to natural gas that is cleaner and costs less because, you know, capitalists innovated and changed the rules, which Trump would appreciate if he were a real capitalist, instead of the crony kind. Whatever coal’s culture-war relevance is to Trump, the industry barely employs 50,000 people, the population of the megalopolis we call Parsippany, N.J.
He also took time to tweet, in all caps, “FAIR TRADE!”
And to tweet a lot about Robert Mueller, who is methodically unraveling Trump’s 2016 campaign and a lot about his personal finances, with consequences not yet known.
And Roseanne Barr, Samantha Bee, and why Memorial Day is really about Donald J. Trump.
And to tweet again about the jobs report an hour before it came out, manipulating global markets for a cheap cable-TV thrill because, well, he’s a toddler. (And following up with the lie about setting records. Even though Trump has delivered more jobs in three different monthly reports since last year, while job growth is slowing, not accelerating).
No toddlers here.
Jobs report aside (and notwithstanding a very solid Friday print on manufacturing sentiment), there are actually a rising number of reasons to fret that the party is nearing an end.
Every expansion ends when something it’s based on rots — commercial real estate in 1990, tech-stock valuations in 2000, the housing bubble in 2007.
One really disturbing piece of the puzzle was a government report saying U.S. birth rates in 2017 were the lowest in 30 years — a sign that young consumers are pessimistic. The Federal Reserve is eager to raise interest rates (in part to offset Trump’s unwise, expansionary fiscal policy, a step Republicans refused to take when the economy needed it), which won’t hurt much right away but will eat away at purchasing power over time. And real wage gains are actually lower than in 2014-2015, in part because rising gasoline prices and tariffs will eat up most of the gains middle-class families get from last year’s tax cut.
You have less confident consumers (watch what they do, like not trade up their homes, rather than what they say in confidence surveys), whose debt burden will rise with rate hikes, and whose real wage gains are shrinking as job growth slows. That’s all before Trump gives in to his trade id. Stock-market gains Friday mean nothing — the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.90% hasn’t made up its losses after Thursday’s trade announcement and is down for the week. The S&P 500 SPX, +1.08% returned 16% in 2006, remember.
Every expansion ends when something it’s based on rots — commercial real estate in 1990, tech-stock valuations in 2000, the housing bubble in 2007. The thing rotting now is confidence in the steadiness of the man in charge, an element of the post-2008 expansion we should appreciate more.
Trade policy is a symptom of the disease, fewer babies and housing sales signs of its effects. And Trump’s public spinning, with a staff recently stripped of nearly all of its adults, is a sign that it’s likely to get a lot worse.
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