Trump's Economic Advisor  ⚐

At some point in the next day or so, I’ll write up my quick thoughts on this election (i.e. please vote Hillary, don’t vote Trump).

If you need more reason to not trust Trump and the people who are guiding his campaign, this New Yorker article by Adam Davidson should be more than enough:

This is an appealing fantasy for some. But Navarro’s view is not just simplistic, it is wrong and dangerous. There’s no reason to think China would acquiesce to Trump’s threats; doing so would all but guarantee that China would face an unending series of similar threats from America and others. Instead, it would most likely respond with tariffs of its own, shutting down American imports. China already trades more with the European Union than it does with the U.S., and would shift its trading strategy even more decisively away from us. It is hard to find a major American exporter who doesn’t see China as its most promising area of growth. A trade war would shatter General Motors, all of Hollywood, the music industry, Boeing, and the entire state of Washington, which exports more goods to China than any other.

There’s more:

These are just the easily predicted first-order effects of a massive tariff increase on all Chinese imports. There are many terrifying second-order impacts. Trump and Navarro focus on America’s manufacturing-trade deficit. But the global economy has also brought the U.S. a tremendous investment surplus. Foreign governments, companies, and citizens spend much of their savings on U.S. government bonds and the stock of American companies. While this investment has not always led to benign outcomes (the financial crisis of the previous decade was, in part, caused by all that cash from all over the world seeking returns in the U.S.), shutting down global trade would, necessarily, also shut down this investment. Interest rates would skyrocket, and the U.S. would enter a painful recession, possibly a depression.

This is the reason almost all economists are against a Trump presidency. This isn’t elites from their ivory towers; these are the people who understand how global economies work. And very few of them support Trump. What he’s selling, at best, isn’t possible; at worst, it’ll cause massive economic problems in the US.