Stephen Miran on 'restructuring the world economy'

Bad macro takes have consequences

Before the turn-of-the-year, President-elect Trump announced Stephen Miran’s nomination to chair his Council of Economic Advisers. It is impossible to know how influential Miran or anyone else will be in determining the policies of the new administration. The traditional form and processes of the US government will almost certainly be subordinated to Trump’s personal relationships and whims. But we can still interrogate Stephen Miran’s published views to get a sense of the sort of advice Trump might receive.

Miran wrote a piece for Hudson Bay Capital, A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, discussing some of the policies the incoming Trump administration might adopt. The piece does not represent the views of Hudson Bay Capital and has no formal status with the incoming administration. Miran himself says the essay is ‘not policy advocacy,’ just an exploration of things a second Trump administration could do. But it does spell out what Miran sees as the problem that needs to be solved and how the various policy instruments at the disposal of the US government might be deployed to address it. Miran’s views will give a fig leaf of intellectual respectability to those policies and help rationalise things that Trump was probably going to do anyway.