The 41-page blueprint that may help explain Trump’s painful trade wars

Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “…An economic treatise by a top Trump adviser is being read as a roadmap of his tariff policy. But even he says it’s not what Trump is implementing In July 1944, during World War II, hundreds of economic policymakers from dozens of countries gathered at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to establish a new framework for the global financial system once the war ended. The resulting Bretton Woods agreement has shaped international trade ever since. Roughly 80 years later, President Donald Trump’s chaotic trade policies have fueled speculation among investors and economists that a modern-day equivalent may be on the horizon — a “Mar-a-Lago accord” to revise those postwar global trade rules, crafted at his resort in Palm Beach, Florida. One of Trump’s top economic advisers has written a 41-page document that lays out the possibility of achieving just such an agreement, through a combination of tariffs and other policies. Now, foreign bankers, Wall Street traders and congressional aides alike are reading it in search of clues. Written by Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System” has emerged as what many observers hope is a blueprint for trying to understand the administration’s erratic economic policy. Miran’s paper argues that unilateral tariffs may be necessary to force U.S. trading partners to make changes. He writes that the dollar’s strength for the past half-century has made U.S. exports too expensive for the rest of the world to buy, and imports too cheap for U.S. consumers to pass up, degrading U.S. manufacturing and industrial output. Trump, Miran suggests, could try to force scores of countries to increase the value of their currencies — possibly through a U.S.-launched trade war that puts unrelenting economic pressure on the rest of the world. (Miran describes the idea only as one of a handful of options, rather than a definitive set of recommendations.)…”