Apparently, everyone has come back from vacation. For the last month there has been a real dearth of articles that inspired comment. Now there is a superabundance of them. Take this one, for example, from Political Calculations on the effects of Trump’s trade war:
In the absence of its strategy to minimize its economy’s intake of U.S. goods and services, the near-zero growth rate of China’s imports of U.S. goods in July 2018 would be consistent with recessionary conditions being present in that country, which was certainly suggested in early 2018 prior to the implementation of any new tariffs being imposed by either nation on the other’s goods.
However, since China’s political leaders have adopted that strategy, it is contributing to the appearance of slow growth in China’s economy from this particular data series. We can however use that data to get a sense of the extent to which the tit-for-tat tariffs that both nations have imposed on each other since the trade war between them began after mid-March 2018 by looking at the combined value of the U.S.’ imports to and exports from China, where we can use the trend established in the months before any tariffs were first imposed as a counterfactual to tell us what the value of trade would be in the absence of their budding trade war with each other.
[…]
Based on this very simple counterfactual, we think that in the absence of the U.S.-China trade war, the combined monthly value of goods and services traded between the two nations would be roughly $1 billion, or 2%, higher through July 2018 that what actually has been recorded.
or, said another way, not much. Certainly not the apocalypse that many were predicting. I’d say that it’s probably too soon to tell but if the “trade war” has had any effect, it’s been too small to measure.
