President-elect Donald J. Trump today announced the formation of the White House National Trade Council (NTC) and his selection of Dr. Peter Navarro to serve as Assistant to the President and Director of Trade and Industrial Policy.
The formation of the National Trade Council further demonstrates the President-elect’s determination to make American manufacturing great again and to provide every American the opportunity to work in a decent job at a decent wage. Navarro is a visionary economist and will develop trade policies that shrink our trade deficit, expand our growth, and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores.
The mission of the National Trade Council will be to advise the President on innovative strategies in trade negotiations, coordinate with other agencies to assess U.S. manufacturing capabilities and the defense industrial base, and help match unemployed American workers with new opportunities in the skilled manufacturing sector. The National Trade Council will also lead the Buy America, Hire America program to ensure the President-elect’s promise is fulfilled in government procurement and projects ranging from infrastructure to national defense.
The National Trade Council will work collaboratively and synergistically with the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the Domestic Policy Council to fulfill the President’s vision of peace and prosperity through military and economic strength. For the first time, there will be a council within the White House that puts American manufacturing and American workers first, and that thinks strategically about the health of America’s defense industrial base and the role of trade and manufacturing in national security.
As a Harvard Ph.D. economist and UC-Irvine professor, Navarro has been instrumental in challenging the prevailing Washington orthodoxy on so-called free trade.
“I read one of Peter’s books on America’s trade problems years ago and was impressed by the clarity of his arguments and thoroughness of his research,” said President-elect Trump. “He has presciently documented the harms inflicted by globalism on American workers, and laid out a path forward to restore our middle class. He will fulfill an essential role in my administration as a trade advisor.”
During the campaign, Navarro, together with Commerce Secretary-designee Wilbur Ross, worked to develop and communicate the trade and economic agenda of the President-elect and a new vision to bring back America’s manufacturing wealth.
“Peter Navarro is the best person President-elect Donald Trump could have chosen to head his National Trade Council,” said Ross. “We were a great team during the campaign, and we will be a great team during the Administration.”
“I am deeply honored for the opportunity to serve the President-elect and this nation and to advise on policies to rebalance our trade, rebuild our industrial base, and restore America’s comprehensive national power by making America great again,” said Navarro.
[TLS]
“visionary economist” ????
Are you nuts. Navarro’s actual areas of expertise within economics do not lie within trade theory or anything related to macroeconomics. All of his serious peer-reviewed papers are in energy economics or in the economics of charitable giving. In recent years he has tried dabbling in both trade theory and macroeconomics. However he makes very basic errors in most of his papers on trade and macroeconomics.
Scott Sumner who is one of the top conservative macroeconomists in the world (he has been talked about for some years now as a possible future Fed Chair) recently wrote a take down of Navarro on the VAT where he shows how Navarro makes fundamental arithmetic errors which lead him to incorrect conclusions.
Other economists from both the right and left whose areas of expertise are in trade and macroeconomics have also written papers or articles showing how Navarro makes basic arithmetic or statistical errors that lead him to erroneous conclusions. These include Greg Mankiw and George Selgin on the right and Brad Delong and Paul Krugman on the left (and for anyone who will complain about Krugman being a liberal NY Times writer, his Economics Nobel was for his academic work on trade theory back in 1980’s and 1990’s and his work in trade theory is widely respected across the board).
Anybody who writes papers containing basic arithmetic and statistical errors of the type that Greg Mankiw says would get a failing grade in an introductory level undergrad class is not someone I want anywhere near anything policy related whatsoever.