Trump's Tariff Guru Explains It All For You

Global experiment in the dismal science will test his hypothesis

Stephen Miran held his opinions about tariffs and trade deficits long before he became Donald Trump’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. His 41-page paper on the topic, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” drew a fair bit of attention from econ geeks when he published it last November following Trump’s election victory. However, his face has only become familiar to average Americans in recent days as he has been called upon to explain the administration’s tariff policy.

Set your assumptions aside. Miran, a Senior Strategist at Hudson Bay Capital, is not dumb. Nor does he seem driven by ideology. Miran is an economic theorist with a legitimate critique of the way his profession understands tariffs and trade. While his ideas fly in the face of conventional economic wisdom, they happen to line up perfectly with Trump’s protectionist politics. As a result, the administration is running an economic experiment to find out whether the US dollar can remain the world’s reserve currency without running up big trade deficits, anymore.

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If it works — and that is far from certain — then Donald Trump will truly become an historic figure. Hate it as much as you want, that’s how history happens. If it doesn’t work, then history will render a damning verdict. Either way, it is vital to understand the argument that Stephen Miran is actually making rather than try to reduce it to a caricature or a cartoon meme. We must hold him to his own standards.