Browse by Media Hit and Trade

The Institute for Policy Innovation is praising the expected naming of CNBC commentator and analyst Larry Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn as President Donald Trump's chief economic advisor (head of the National Economic Council).

"Even if one agrees that U.S.-made steel must be protected, the problem is that imposing large tariffs gives a green light to every other company or industry hoping to use government power to protect it from competition," IPI resident scholar Merrill Matthews said. "They will now descend on Washington, checkbook in hand. That's the swamp, or what's known as 'crony capitalism.'"

As Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation noted in a Jan. 2 Wall Street Journal op-ed column, NAFTA participants Canada, Mexico and the United States are codependent on energy and benefit from the trade agreement’s tariff terms.

With the EU set to lift caps on sugar production, African producers could be squeezed out of a market that has propped up places like Swaziland for years.

More than 100 countries, from Cuba to India to Russia, produce sugar from sugarcane and sugar beet. Many of them are able to undercut the prices demanded by Swazi farmers, who receive no subsidies from their government, in markets such as West Africa and the Middle East.

"The U.S. has a trade deficit because consumers have money to spend — and they spend it," said Merrill Matthews, IPI resident scholar, in a recent post. "Moreover, when U.S. consumers buy foreign goods and services (the current account), that money returns in the form of investment (the capital account). In other words, the accounts balance."

Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade bloviating of late might give the impression the whole party has lost its bearings on this economic issue. Fortunately, like so much else, Trump doesn’t talk for Republicans.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s trade policy speech this week was misleading on the actual state of U.S. trade, a scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation said in a Rare op-ed published on Friday.

"Dear GOP delegates: You cannot nominate someone who endorses these positions," Tom Giovanetti, the president of a free market think tank, tweeted, adding, "Trump would turn the Republican Party into the party of economic know-nothings."

A key House panel on Thursday approved legislation to end the 40-year federal ban on exports of US crude oil, and the bill is expected to win further approval in the House and Senate before being passed on to the White House.