Economic Indicators to Follow in the Trump Era?

Tyler Cowen gives three.

if the worst predictions about Trump turn out to be true, the negative consequences ought to show up in some of the world’s most fragile spots.

He suggests following an index of Baltic stocks, an index of Taiwan stocks, and the exchange value of the dollar. On the later, he writes,

Many emerging-economy companies are running up alarmingly high dollar-denominated debts, and a strong dollar increases that debt burden in real terms. More generally, the dollar remains the primary source of liquidity in the global economy, especially if the eurozone sees continuing troubles. A more expensive dollar implies a greater scarcity of liquidity, and there is increasing evidence this may herald or cause global financial and economic volatility.

What about domestic policy? I would suggest looking at an indicator of where the highest-income counties are located. For now, Terrence P. Jeffrey writes,

The four richest counties in the United States, when measured by median household income, are all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to newly released data from the Census Bureau.

It would be nice to have incomes go up more in the rest of the country than in the DC area.

3 thoughts on “Economic Indicators to Follow in the Trump Era?

  1. Shouldn’t Trump also be requesting that the Treasury literally “print money”, rather than borrow, to pay for increased deficits (thru tax cuts and/or infrastructure purchase increases) — using exchange rate, rather than inflation, as a measure moderating the rate of money printing. Whenever the value of (Kudlow’s King) Dollar is going up, print more monetary base to directly lower the exchange value of the Dollar. And stop any such printing if the dollar is dropping.

    Larry talked about this in Sep:http://townhall.com/columnists/larrykudlow/2016/09/17/tax-cuts-king-dollar–growth-n2219450 << where he wants a stable dollar.

  2. Trump is appointing so many billionaires to his administration that “incomes” in the D.C. area may go up regardless of the government’s policies.

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