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Phil Magness Profile picture
@PhilWMagness
Aug 12 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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🧵Steve Miran is a pending nominee to the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to his fringe views on dollar devaluation, he has a long history of making basic errors about economics.
The first example comes from a bizarre speech he gave after Liberation Day back in April.

Miran declared - without any evidence - that the entire economics profession is "wrong" to oppose tariffs.

whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat…Image
Miran then proceeded to mischaracterize "trade models" by falsely claiming that they do not account for trade deficits, or assume they will self-correct.

In reality, economists since Adam Smith in 1776 have been pointing out the fallacy of Miran's thinking: Image
As for Miran's claim that modern economists assume no trade deficits or assume that they are self-correcting, it's utter nonsense. There's a huge academic literature by leading economists on the persistence of trade deficits. Miran appears to be unaware of its existence. Image
Image
In addition to the basic errors in his claims about trade economics, Miran has a long history of misusing and misrepresenting academic papers by other economists to make claims that their authors do not support.
Miran's "Mar a Lago Accord" white paper from 2024 cited a paper by Costinot & Rodiguez-Claire to support his call for a 20% baseline "optimal" tariff.

The problem? Both authors denounced Miran's proposal for misrepresenting their work.

lemonde.fr/en/opinion/art…Image
Exact same thing happened again a few months later. Miran cited a 2024 paper by Pulojas and Rossbach, claiming that it showed the US could "win" a trade war by imposing tariffs.

Except as Pujolas explained, their paper aimed to show the exact opposite.

cbc.ca/news/canada/ha…Image
Issues of competence have plagued Miran since he took his current job at the White House. In April he met with Wall Street investors to calm their concerns about Trump's tariffs.

The opposite happened & they left the meeting saying Miran was "incoherent"
fortune.com/article/trump-…Image
This is all in addition to Miran's adherence to a long list of fringe economic beliefs about trade, dollar devaluation, and even a backdoor default on the US National Debt, which the Wall Street Journal documented yesterday.

?wsj.com/opinion/who-is…

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More from @PhilWMagness

Phil Magness Profile picture
Jul 31
So.,,Who wants to break it to Michael Brendan Dougherty that this misquotation of Disraeli is from a speech he gave in support of the protectionist Corn Laws, which in turn were a contributing cause of the Irish famine? 🧵 Image
The actual quote was not from 1843, but rather a speech by Disraeli in 1845 where he attacked Richard Cobden and the free traders over their push to repeal the Corn Laws.

It also referred to *protection* as the "expedient," not "free trade." Image
Disraeli would maintain his protectionist stance even as the Irish famine worsened.

In a later speech, he (in)famously denounced PM Robert Peel as a "political pedlar" who sold out his party to free trade by repealing the Corn Laws as a famine relief measure with Whig votes. Image
Read 5 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 30
There's an extremely stupid talking point going around the MAGA/Tarrif-Bot world that claims Trump's tariffs are justified under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Let's investigate it.🧵
First, let's start with the USCIT case that struck down Trump's tariffs.

This case was NOT about Section 232 tariffs under the 1962 Act. It was about the "Liberation Day" tariffs, which Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (aka IEEPA). Image
Trump's IEEPA tariffs differ from Section 232 tariffs because the former were imposed by unilateral executive order.

That's a problem though, because IEEPA doesn't actually authorize the president to impose tariffs by executive order. Hence the court's decision.
Read 9 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 5
I genuinely believe that Bessent is one of the leveler heads in a White House that's stocked full of protectionist crackpots. That said, he still grossly misunderstands tariffs, as per his piece in today's WSJ.🧵
Case in point here. He starts by arguing that tariffs are a negotiating tool to "reduce trade barriers in other countries." Image
Yet how is the Trump admin's track record going? Quite simply, the negotiations have failed on every count. We now have retaliatory trade wars all over the globe. Trump expended his negotiating capital in Feb/Mar with on-again, off-again tariffs to the point nobody trusts him.
Read 12 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 1
Marxists: You can't use GDP to show prosperity because it's just a construct of the neoclassical paradigm to reinforce capitalist power disparities.

Also Marxists: Rising inequality proves that capitalism is failing, as per Piketty's stats...which use GDP as their denominator.
Marxists: Capitalism is responsible for climate change, colonialism, slavery, the bubonic plague, and every other disaster and death in human history.

Also Marxists: You can't fault Marxism for the atrocities of explicitly-Marxist states. Those weren't real Marxism.
Marxists: Economists are afraid of Marx and therefore refuse to read him.

Also Marxists: Every economist who reads Marx and methodically rebuts Marx's economic theories is really just part of a neoclassical conspiracy to uphold their own power relationships and capitalism.
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Mar 23
Tariffs are extremely unpopular with the American public (61% view them as harmful) and are uniformly opposed by economists. So why are we pursuing a trade war?

A. Trump stacked his economic team with fanatical band of Tariff Fundamentalist crackpots who support them anyway.
Unlike most tariffs in the receng past, there isn't even a strong lobbyist push behind these ones. Lobbyists usually try to carve out tariffs for specific goods or industries, not impose them on entire countries. That suggests the source of the current tariffs is ideological.
And what are the ideologies? Well, Trump is pro-tariff but with a shallow understanding of how tariffs work. As a result, you get about 5-6 different competing rationales for tariffs that also conflict with each other. Hence the see-saw effect we've seen since February.
Read 8 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Mar 2
This is the fringe and error-riddled economic history that JD Vance brought into the White House.

americancompass.org/rediscovering-…
It's rooted in a bizarre rehabilitation of the economic philosophy of 19th century Sen. Henry Clay, a large slaveholder from Kentucky who believed that the role of the federal government was to centrally plan the national economy, all fueled by debt finance and a National Bank
When Clay laid out his agenda in a speech in 1824, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were still alive. They were both aghast at what they read, and believed that Clay's agenda was a full-fledged assault on the US Constitution.

independent.org/news/article.a…
Read 5 tweets

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