Economists' Fears of a 2020 Recession Surge

Trump brags about the state of the US economy but economists increasingly fear his economic policies are about to drive the economy into the ditch.  The main cause of concern?  Trump's insane tariff and trade policies that are already slamming many manufacturers and farmers and, if continued will also begin to hit consumers with steeply higher prices.  If these fears prove correct, I hope they hit early enough in 2020 so as to help purge Trump from the White House and lead to the defeat of numerous Republicans.  CNN looks at the economic forecast:

America's business leaders are growing more worried that the United States will enter a recession by the end of 2020. Their primary fear: protectionist trade policy.

That is the topline finding of a report released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics. The survey, based on responses by 53 economists, is a leading barometer of where the US business community thinks the economy is headed.

"Increased trade protectionism is considered the primary downwide risk to growth by a majority of the respondents," Gregory Daco, chief US economist for Oxford Economics, said in a statement. The report found what it called a "surge" in recession fears among the economists.

The report comes as the United States ratchets up its trade war with China and has gone after other major trading partners, including Mexico and India. The risk of recession happening soon remains low but will "rise rapidly" next year. The survey's respondents said the risk of recession starting in 2019 is only 15% but 60% by the end of 2020. About a third of respondents forecast a recession will begin halfway through next year.

The United States is probably somewhere in the last stages of an epic run of economic growth that began in 2009. Dramatic and coordinated responses by the Federal Reserve, Congress and the Obama administration helped pull the country up from the Great Recession.

Donald Trump, who took the reins of the US economy from Barack Obama in 2017, has aggressively tried to reorder the US position on global trade. He has picked prominent fights with China and Europe and has threatened tariffs on Mexico over illegal immigration and India over access to its markets.

Other notable findings from the National Association for Business Economics: 

-- 56% of respondents cited increasingly protectionist trade policy as the greatest risk to the US economy in 2019. Separately, 88% pointed to US trade policy, and retaliation by other nations, for why they lowered their GDP growth forecasts.

-- 14% believe a "substantial" decline in the stock market, and 10% feel a slowdown in global growth, are the biggest risks to the US economy.

-- Business spending will moderate this year and next after growing a strong 6.9% in 2018.

The Small-Town Cost of Trump’s Shortsighted Trade Wars

Midwest farmers are seeing an end of Chinese soybean purchases as China moves to Brazil as a new source of the commodity.  Automakers are decrying steel and aluminum tariffs that will increase auto prices by thousands of dollars and likely push auto manufacturers to look for savings through employee layoffs. And in numerous small towns important manufacturing concerns are facing economic turmoil and possible plant closings all so Der Trumpenführer can feel like a "tough guy" and stroke his sick ego.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at one small town in Arkansas - which voted heavily for Trump - which is now reaping the ill fruits of supporting an unfit malignant narcissist.  As noted before on this blog, while I worry about the children who will be adversely impacted, I hold no sympathy for the adults who voted for this malignant individual and now, in a form of divine justice, are being punished.  Here are article highlights:

In May, when President Trump announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Canada and Mexico, Chris Pratt, the plant manager at Mid-Continent Nail, the largest nail manufacturer in the U.S., was caught in a bind. Poplar Bluff, Missouri, Mid-Continent’s home, is a sprawling town of seventeen thousand on the eastern edge of the Ozarks, a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of St. Louis. It’s a quiet place and notably conservative. . . . . In 2016, nearly eighty per cent of the county went for Trump. “Did I like the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’?” Pratt said to me. “I sure did.”

And yet the President’s shoot-first, ask-questions-later economic policies have already cost the town hundreds of jobs. Since the tariffs were implemented, in June, the price of imported steel has risen by twenty-five per cent. Mid-Continent, which had to raise its prices on nails nearly as much, soon lost half of its orders and had to let go of almost half its workforce. If they don’t get any relief, Pratt has said, the factory will likely close.

Mid-Continent’s unexpected role in Trump’s trade wars highlights the tangled knots of the global economy. Before 2012, the firm was owned by two local brothers, who sold it to Deacero, a Mexican steel manufacturer (also owned by brothers), which now supplies Mid-Continent with the wire needed to make nails. When Pratt learned of the sale, he worried that the Mexican firm would close the Poplar Bluff factory and move the jobs there south of the border. But the new owners made a commitment to continue making nails in the U.S. In the next six years, the number of employees at Mid-Continent more than doubled, from two hundred and forty-seven to five hundred and seven. Last December, at the factory’s Christmas party, Pratt was feeling so optimistic about the future that he announced hopes to grow to a thousand employees.

Pratt’s effort to save his company—and the jobs of his employees, many of whom are friends—has prompted appearances on NPR, Fox News, and other media outlets. In July, he told a reporter for the Washington Post, “We’re in a situation where we’re fighting against our own country.” He has also met with members of Congress, U.S. senators, and even the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross.

Unfortunate, yes.  But these people who voted for Trump brought this economic disaster on themselves when they embraced Trump's racist and xenophobic agenda.

Ford Motor: Layoffs After Losing $1 Billion to Trump's Trade Tariffs

America continues to caught in multiple trade wars started by narcissistic dimwit who occupies the White House.  And the consequences for average Americans is worsening as Trump's tariffs - which are in effect a tax on goods and materials - take effect.  Many businesses find their cost of doing business soaring.  As reported by Fortune, one such business is Ford Motor Company, America's second larges automaker which is estimated to have lost $billion due to Trump's tariffs and is expected to cut 24,000 jobs.  The only silver lining is that many job losses in America will be in states that voted for Der Trumpenführer.  But it is not just businesses who will pay the price for Trump's tariffs.  As the Washington Examiner reports, the added tax burden from the tariffs will greatly exceed the costs of the Affordable Health Care Act which Republicans called "job killing."  First these highlights from Fortune: 

Ford is having a bad year in 2018. Its stock is down 29%, and the tariffs imposed by President Trump have reportedly cost the company $1 billion, as the company is in the midst of a reorganization. Now, the company is announcing layoffs.

Jim Hackett, Ford’s CEO, is working to engineer a $25.5 billion restructuring of the automaker, hoping to cut costs and remain competitive, the Wall Street Journal reports. But auto sales are down, and one reason is the trade tariffs that Trump has imposed on metals and other goods. According to Bloomberg, Hackett has said they have already cost the company $1 billion in profit and could do “more damage” if the disputes aren’t resolved quickly.

Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker by sales, is making aggressive job cuts as part of that reorganization, NBC News reported. While the company hasn’t said how many jobs will be lost, a report from Morgan Stanley estimates “a global headcount reduction of approximately 12 percent,” or 24,000 of Ford’s 202,000 workers worldwide.”

The Kansas City Star reported Tuesday that Ford has temporarily halted production of transit vans in Claycomo, Mo. The move is intended to build up Ford’s inventories of the vans, but it will leave 2,000 workers idle between Oct. 22 and Nov. 4.

Despite news of the layoffs, Ford’s stock closed down 3.4% Tuesday.

At a time when automakers are scrambling to prepare for self-driving cars, Ford is also struggling to keep pace with the rest of the industry. September was a bad month for U.S. auto sales—with aggregate sales down 7%—but Ford’s drop off was even more severe. Ford said its sales of its vehicles declined 11.2% last month, with sales of its best-selling F-Series pickup trucks down 9%.

As for the average citizen, the tariffs are wiping out much of any alleged benefits from the Trump/GOP tax cuts that principally benefited the very wealthy. This from the Examiner:

The $67.2 billion estimated 2019 tax burden of the Affordable Care Act prior to those changes is lower than the cost of new trade taxes once a scheduled $30 billion tariff increase takes effect in January. If every currently proposed tariff is enacted, the total trade tax burden will nearly double even the tax burden of the pre-reform ACA — NTUF estimates the net total of proposed and enacted trade taxes to be $132.55 billion. That would offset more than 70 percent of the $188.8 billion in 2019 individual income tax cuts.

American businesses and consumers are slapped by tariffs just as viciously as the target countries. While tariffs make foreign goods less competitive in the American market, it's actually the importer that remits the cost of the tariff to U.S. Customs.

American consumers pay for tariffs as well. Tariff costs paid by an importing business are generally passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Even when a domestic business chooses to change its behavior because of a tariff and avoid foreign goods, there was likely a reason why the domestic business had previously been importing foreign goods over domestic ones. Whether it means higher prices or lower-quality goods, American consumers pay the price.

Artificially higher prices for goods through trade restrictions have ripple effects throughout the economy. Businesses experiencing increased supply costs must make up the loss elsewhere, often through reduced wages or employment.

Will Democrats Retake the House of Representatives?

GOP's Barbara Comstock - VA 10th District - She needs to be sent into retirement. 

With election day 2018 a little more than three (3) months away, despite the daily distractions of Trump's deranged and/or lie filled tweets, the Manafort trial and the ongoing Russiagate investigation, more and more focus is on the political prize of the control of the  House of Representatives.  If Democrats win control, some of Trump's most egregious efforts can be blunted, hearings and subpoenas can be held and issued, and spending and budget bills will originate under Democrat control.   Moreover, oversight of federal agencies - which Republicans have failed to do - can perhaps rein in the Trump/GOP effort to create a new Gilded Age.  A lengthy piece in the Washington Post looks at the coming election - where many believe the Democrats are favored to win control - and analyzes the hurdles the Democrats must overcome.  Here are excerpts:

Democrats are likely to win back control of the House of Representatives. That's the conventional wisdom in Washington about November's midterm elections.

“Democrats remain substantial favorites for House control,” wrote David Wasserman, a nonpartisan election analyst for the Cook Political Report, last week.

We explained why here. The short version is: Voter energy on the left is palpable, Republicans are defending vulnerable seats, and their historic level of retirements is only making their exposure worse. Plus, Republicans are in power, which history suggests voters will try to counterbalance this November.

Not surprisingly, Republican operatives working to keep control of the House disagree with some of that reasoning.

Here's why Republicans are hopeful they can hang onto their majority:

1. Special elections are just that, special. There's no denying Democrats have had extraordinary success in special elections in the Trump era.

Democrats have picked up more than 40 state legislative seats across the nation since President Trump was elected, some deep in Trump country. They won a Senate seat in Alabama last fall. This spring they flipped a congressional district in Pennsylvania — again, deep in Trump country. On Tuesday, they could take a deep-red Ohio congressional seat. That could trim the target number of seats Democrats need to take back the House this November from 23 to 22. Republicans argue that each one of those scenarios was unique.  . . . . Democrats will have to decide how to spread their resources across some 60 potentially competitive races. (Though so will Republicans, for that matter.)

2. Republicans feel good about their most vulnerable incumbents. If Democrats are going to win a wave election, they need to start with the lowest-hanging fruit. And Republicans don't think that will be so easy.

There are a couple open seats that are gimmies for Democrats to pick up, notably two in Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey. . . . Other top races to topple Republicans will play out in the New York City, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle media markets.In other words, Republicans calculate that a wave is going to cost Democrats significant money and energy to build up. That being said, the Cook Political Report is out Friday with one stat that underscores just how exposed House Republicans are this election in defending those seats: It ranks 60 Republican-held seats as vulnerable, compared to just five for Democrats.

3. There are structural barriers for Democrats to overcome.Gerrymandering is a big one. Republicans swept into control of state legislatures in 2010 in time to take charge of drawing electoral districts after the 2010 Census. Democrats have been locked out of power in the House ever since.

Voters are also increasingly self-sorting into congressional districts in a way that gives Republicans an advantage to control Congress. Democratic-leaning voters cluster in cities, while conservative voters spread out in rural areas across the rest of the state. The result is that Democrats' votes are essentially diluted by living in areas that would vote for a Democrat for Congress anyway.

Some independent analysts think Democrats will need to win the popular vote by seven to 11 percentage points just to get a bare majority. While seven points is firmly in doable territory — for a wave election at least — 11 points is a historically large margin.

4. The economy is chugging along, and there are no major international disasters. Republicans openly acknowledge that they're at a disadvantage this election because they control all major levers of government. That means they've been able to pass a tax-cut bill, but it also means voters who aren't happy with their health care or the impact that tariffs are having on their industry can reason it's Republicans' fault. . . . wage growth remains sluggish — and everything is below Trump's vocalized expectations, as The Post's Philip Bump notes.

Trump Is Gaslighting Soybean Farmers

Many rural areas, especially in the Mid-West voted for Donald Trump.  Now, thanks to Trump wholly self-created trade war these same rural areas are likely to take an economic beating, particularly as China retaliates for Trump's tariffs and looks to other markets to replace agricultural products previously  purchased from American farmers. Trump is trying to deceive these - in my view fools and/or bigots - who fell for his appeals to racism and xenophobia by trying to pretend that China and other nations commenced the trade war that Trump himself started.  A piece in Slate looks at this gaslighting of what Trump hopes will prove to be the gullible.   Here are excerpts:

American soybean farmers are fretting about becoming a casualty of Donald Trump’s brewing trade war with China, which happens to be their most important export market. Prices for the crop took a dive after tensions between the U.S. and Beijing began to flare up earlier this year, and in June, the People’s Republic finally placed a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans and other agricultural products in retaliation for the White House’s duties on Chinese goods.

[Trump] The president, of course, is trying to absolve himself of all responsibility:  “I am in Brussels, but always thinking about our farmers. Soy beans fell 50% from 2012 to my election. Farmers have done poorly for 15 years. Other countries’ trade barriers and tariffs have been destroying their businesses. I will open...”

I don’t usually like to use the phrase gaslighting, because it’s kind of a cliche at this point, but I’m pretty sure this is gaslighting. Trump is right on the narrow point that prices for soybeans have fallen by around half since 2012. But that really has nothing to do with trade barriers by other countries, as he suggests. Crop prices have plunged because of a worldwide boom in farming production that’s led to a giant commodity glut. Meanwhile, exports have actually been a crucial bright spot for American farmers: Measured by tonnage, the U.S. sells a little under half of its total soybean production overseas, with almost 60 percent of those exports headed to China alone last year.

U.S. soybean exports to China* were already down 22 percent through the first five months of this year, and the great fear among growers is that they could end up permanently losing market share there as buyers there shift to other suppliers, particularly Brazil, while Trump’s trade conflict wears on.

[Trump] The president wants the farm belt to believe he’s coming to its rescue. Somehow, I doubt farmers are going to buy it.

Trump played these voters for fools and karma may be about to catch up with them. 

Will the Trade War Trump Started Take Down the GOP?

So far there has been little limit as to how far Republicans will go in prostituting themselves to Donald Trump.  Indeed, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell make real life tawdry prostitutes look somewhat virtuous in comparison.  But there are signs that among some Republicans perhaps the desire for self-preservation at the polls may be beginning to make them realize that Trump's completely self-initiated trade war could be very bad news.  Already, the Chinese, European Union and Canadian responses to Trump's unhinged tariffs against them are causing economic pain in the Mid-West and Trump voting counties.  And this is before China responds to Trump's new $200 billion tariff increase on China.  With luck, the economic pain in states like Iowa that threw America principles on the trash heap and supported Trump will be truly horrific (I believe embracing hate and bigotry need to have very severe consequences).  A piece in Politico looks at growing GOP angst over Trump's possible total destruction of the party.  Here are excerpts:

While President Donald Trump was in Europe speaking for America’s interest in the world, Vice President Mike Pence was in the heartland speaking to its anxieties.

On Wednesday, as Trump excoriated America’s allies for taking advantage of his nation’s largesse, Pence was gliding through the greater Midwest, seeking to calm the nerves of farmers and political foot soldiers worried that the administration’s policies will irrevocably hit their pocketbooks and set back the party before the midterm elections.

The split screen . . . underscores the administration’s high-risk, high-reward approach to global diplomacy and domestic policy that helped it claim the White House and keep its base energized and loyal, yet could plunge the GOP into peril if things go off the rails.

Republicans are growing nervous about the latter possibility. . . . there’s a real fear among our members that a trade war will squander the economic gains we made with tax reform,” a senior GOP official on Capitol Hill told POLITICO on Wednesday.

Trump’s tough talk with allies, coming ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, is adding to their discomfort. . . . the Republican-led U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a motion supporting NATO, a move viewed as reflecting Congress’ concerns over [Trump's] the president’s menacing talk about the alliance.

In Brussels, Trump accused Germany of being “totally controlled” by Russia and lashed out at a controversial gas pipeline project. Trump also reiterated his calls for NATO leaders to increase military spending.

Even as he softened somewhat in meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, his remarks from earlier in the day continued to serve as the basis for questioning from reporters, who asked Macron whether he agreed with Trump that Germany is captive to Russia.

“No,” Macron said, bluntly, after Trump, perhaps flippantly, told reporters he was glad the press was asking the French president the question.  Back at home, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told reporters he didn’t agree with Trump’s accusation.

[T]he uncomfortable reaction domestically to Trump’s renewed haranguing of European allies from members of his own party — and his dispatching of Pence to the Midwest to palliate mounting concerns about a trade war — may begin to foretell an acknowledgment that Republicans could pay a political cost for rocking the boat.

Democratic leaders, sharpening their campaign message head of the midterms, indicated they intend to exploit the issue by depicting the president’s behavior on the world stage as “an embarrassment.” They contend that he’s more interested in cozying up to Putin, who Trump recently suggested is easier to deal with.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement Wednesday: “His behavior this morning is another profoundly disturbing signal that the President is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies.”

Meanwhile, Democrats up and down the ballot are warning that the trade war will devastate the economy — and they are making their Republican opponents answer to whether they agree with Trump.

Democratic messaging has largely focused on the party's candidates doing what’s best for constituents while arguing Republicans will serve as a rubber stamp for Trump.

And so far, Republicans are keeping a stiff upper lip about the political risk of Trump’s trade war. The Pence team framed his visit through the Midwest as part of the vice president’s packed campaign schedule — not a move of tariff damage control.

Pence, of course, is as big a liar as Trump, so anything coming from his lips should be considered untrue until proven otherwise.  

The Trump/Pence Regime’s Potemkin Economy

Despite Trump lies, U.S. Steel is not opening plants.

Canada has announced a new round of tariffs on American products in further retaliation for the ill-conceived Trump tariffs.  The Trump/Pence regime's response to growing evidence of harm to American jobs is to lire - the regime's main approach to anything and everything.  Trump even claimed that U.S. Steel would be opening six new plants - the announcement came as a surprise to the corporation which had had NO communications with Trump.  Yet, the lie is typical of what the white Christian extremist/nationalist base eats up and is too stupid to confirm independently. A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's "wake economy" which brings to mind the myth of "Potemkin villages" in Russia. The difference, of course, was no fool while the same cannot be said of Trump's base which is too happy to embrace lies.  One can only hope harsh reality hits this base very, very hard.  Here are column highlights:

According to legend, Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s ministers (and her lover), created a false impression of prosperity when the empress toured Ukraine. He supposedly did this by setting up fake villages, or possibly just facades, along her route, then dismantling them after she passed, and setting them up again further down the road.  

There probably isn’t much if any truth to the story — among other things, Catherine was too smart and tough-minded to be that easily deceived — but never mind: the legend has become a byword for the general idea of prettifying reality to please a tyrannical ruler.

And it seems highly relevant to some of the economic “news” coming out of the Trump administration the past few days. Just to be clear, the U.S. economy is still doing quite well overall, continuing the long expansion that began during Obama’s first term. . . . But Trump’s actual policy initiatives aren’t doing so well. His tax cut isn’t producing the promised surge in business investment, let alone the promised wage gains; all it has really done is lead to a lot of stock buybacks.

Reflecting this reality, the tax cut is becoming less popular over time. And the early phase of the trade war that was supposed to be “good, and easy to win” isn’t generating the kinds of headlines Trump wanted. Instead, we’re hearing about production shifting overseas to escape both U.S. tariffs on imported inputs and foreign retaliation against U.S. products. It’s really worth reading the submission by General Motors to the Commerce Department, . . . . In other words, “Don’t you understand global supply chains, you idiot?”

But meanwhile, how is the administration responding? By making stuff up. Now, making stuff up is actually standard operating procedure for these guys. We’re talking about an administration that’s taking children away from their parents and putting them in cages in response to a wave of violent immigrant crime that doesn’t, you know, actually exist. Trade policy itself is being driven by claims about the massive tariffs U.S. products face from, say, the European Union — tariffs that, like the immigrant crime wave, don’t actually exist.

But these are negative fictions, tales of wrongdoing by others. When it comes to Trump’s own economic policies, by contrast, it’s all puppies and rainbows — happy stories with no basis in reality.

Some of these come from Trump himself. For example, he declared that the head of U.S. Steel called him to say that the company was opening six new plants. It isn’t, and as far as we can tell the phone call never happened.

Meanwhile, reports say that the Council of Economic Advisers did an internal report concluding that Trump trade policy will cost jobs, not create them; Kevin Hassett, the chairman, pressed on these reports, said that he could neither confirm nor deny them; in other words, they’re true.

But the most Potemkinesque story of the past week was the declaration by Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economic official, that the budget deficit is “coming down rapidly” as “those revenues come rolling in.”  Actually, the deficit is rising fast, mainly because of a plunge in corporate tax receipts — the direct result of the tax cut . . . .

Trump and company are making claims about the results of their policies that bear no relationship to reality. But reality has a well-known liberal bias. Will Trump’s habit of making things up, and his advisors’ willingness to celebrate imaginary policy triumphs, make any difference?

But who will tell him how things are really going? Given what we’ve seen the past few days, they’ll respond to plant closings and economic disruption with fantasies of triumph, while Trump will dismiss reports of problems as fake news. Reality will take a long time to break through, if it ever does. And by then the world trading system may be broken beyond repair.

Again, I wish every economic misfortune possible on states like Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin that should have know better than to embraces racism and lies.  They deserve immense economic pain. 

General Motors: Trump Tariffs Could Lead to GM Downsizing in USA

More Trump supporters may be losing their jobs or facing vastly higher auto prices if the narcissistic cretin-in-chief in the White House proceeds with his ill-conceived tariffs.  Instead of increasing American jobs, the tariffs seem headed toward forcing U.S. manufacturers to move operations out of the USA as Harley-Davidson has announced it is doing.  Now, General Motors is warning that it will take a similar path if Der Trumpenführer continues his push for tariffs.  The good news, of course, is that the job losses will be concentrated in states that went for Trump.  If this happens, karma will certainly bite those who allowed racism and bigotry to dupe them into voting against their own economic best interests (as you can tell, I have a very hard time feeling even a shred of sympathy for these people).  Bloomberg looks at what Trump voters may have rain down on them if GM proceeds with moving operations out of the USA.  Here are highlights:

General Motors Co. issued a stern warning to the Trump administration that it could shrink U.S. operations and cut jobs if tariffs are broadly applied to imported vehicles and auto parts. “Increased import tariffs could lead to a smaller GM, a reduced presence at home and risk less -- not more -- U.S. jobs,” the nation’s largest automaker said in comments submitted Friday to the Commerce Department.

That such a blunt statement came from GM -- a company run by a CEO, Mary Barra, whose normal tack is to avoid the political fray and let trade groups address the president’s policies -- was surprising to industry observers. And it underscored how high she, and many industrial leaders, believe the stakes are as [Trump] the president sinks the U.S. into tit-for-tat trade squabbles across the globe. GM’s public pronouncement follows similar moves by Harley-Davidson Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. and Daimler AG.

The “comment suggests how severe the impact would be to GM, its employees and consumers," said Michelle Krebs, analyst with AutoTrader.com. "There is a lot at stake for GM, the auto industry and the overall economy."

The probe has raised alarm among manufacturers, parts suppliers and auto retailers because all major carmakers -- including GM and Ford Motor Co. -- import a substantial share of the vehicles they sell in the U.S. from other countries. Levies on parts also would have major implications for top models like the Ford F-150 pickup and Toyota Camry sedan by boosting prices by thousands of dollars.

Barra had earlier tried to stay on good terms with Trump. She continued to serve on his Strategic and Policy Forum even after many other CEOs, such as Walt Disney’s Bob Iger and Tesla’s Elon Musk, quit to protest Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement last year. The forum was disbanded in August following Trump’s tepid response to attacks by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Now, the Detroit-based maker of Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC vehicles is warning that additional tariffs -- on top of those recently slapped on steel, aluminum and Chinese products -- could hurt GM and ultimately its customers. Higher prices would crimp sales, particularly to less-affluent consumers, and reduce the number of factory workers needed, it said.

“The threat of steep tariffs on vehicle and auto component imports risks undermining GM’s competitiveness against foreign auto producers by erecting broad brush trade barriers that increase our global costs, remove a key means of competing with manufacturers in lower-wage countries, and promote a trade environment in which we could be retaliated against in other markets,” the company said.

GM’s Chevrolet Silverado pickup was the top-selling model imported from Mexico last year, while the Chevrolet Equinox crossover was the leading vehicle sourced from Canada, according to LMC Automotive.

“GM imports a lot of pickup trucks from Mexico, so it’s a huge issue,” Alan Baum, an auto analyst in West Bloomfield, Michigan, said. “And for parts, it’s not just GM. Everyone imports a lot of electronics from Asia. Those are are high-value parts.”

Hate and bigotry often carry a high economic price - look no further than economically depressed Southwest Virginia for a case in point. 

Job Losses from Trump's Trade War Likely Just Beginning

Much like Mussolini (for whom things did not end well), Donald Trump likes to strut around and act the tough guy. Part of this tough guy/bully routine is Trump's self-created trade war which is already beginning to kill American jobs.  But worse days are likely to come for both American workers more of whom will lose jobs and American consumers who will find themselves paying higher prices for numerous goods.  All so a foul narcissist can feed his insatiable ego and play to the knuckle dragging base of the Republican Party. A column by a former U.S. Trade Representative looks at America's increasingly alienated allies working to form new trading alliances that exclude America.  Here are highlights:

Diversification is the polite way of saying that America’s friends and allies believe we have become an unreliable partner, and they are now looking elsewhere. From Ottawa to Brussels to Seoul, our trading partners are fed up with the Trump administration’s tariffs, and they have given up on trying to charm President Trump or persuade him that free trade is good. To reduce their economic dependence on the United States and their exposure to a potential global trade war, they are forging trade deals that leave us out of the picture altogether. On June 14, Canada’s government asked Parliament to ratify a new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the United States backed out of last year. On June 18, the European Union trade commissioner visited Australia and three days later, New Zealand to begin negotiations for free-trade agreements; and on June 22, South Korea announced plans to pursue negotiations for its first free-trade agreement with Russia.

These moves are a direct response to the Trump administration’s unreliability and unpredictability, and they are a clear sign that the administration’s trade policy priorities — renegotiating deals and punishing violations — are not working out as expected.

[Trump] The president may want better deals to replace the old, “terrible” deals he doesn’t like, but so far, the rest of the world has been reluctant to negotiate new agreements with the United States. The long and growing list of tariffs, particularly those based on dubious national security grounds, has weakened the administration’s ability to form coalitions with other countries to tackle legitimate concerns, especially China’s unfair trade practices.

Instead, our closest trading partners are scrambling to find new markets for exports subject to tariff increases by the United States, and to secure new suppliers for the American products that their own countries are planning to hit with retaliatory tariffs.

Japan is thus accelerating negotiations with other countries. Japan and the European Union plan to sign their free-trade agreement in July. Moreover, it was Japan who stepped up to fill the leadership void left by the American exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Japanese Diet approved a bill to ratify the revised pact this month.

The tone and policies of the Trump administration have even managed to bring two longtime rivals, China and Mexico, closer together. The two countries once competed head-to-head as low-cost manufacturers, with the United States as the most important market. After Mr. Trump began beating the drum for tariffs and a possible withdrawal from Nafta, Mexico’s economy minister, Ildefonso Guajardo, called a visit last year to China “strategic leverage,” saying it “sends the signal that we have alternatives” to the United States.

Regrettably, this leaves the United States on the margins as the rest of the world builds a new trading structure without us. Our workers, farmers and companies will be locked out of important markets. We will lose our chance to help write the rules and set standards for trade in advanced technology, such as alternative-fuel vehicles, 3-D printing and artificial intelligence. Global and regional supply chains will increasingly bypass the United States. And years of efforts by the United States to curb China’s unfair trade practices will lose critical international support. To be sure, as the world’s largest economy, the United States will remain a major player in international commerce. . . . There is a danger, however, in overestimating our negotiating leverage. Trade patterns will shift as our partners look elsewhere. We have spent decades building trust with our allies. We are now squandering it.

Job Losses From Trump’s Ill-conceived Tariffs Begin

I will admit that I have difficulty feeling any sympathy for Trump voters who are beginning to reap what they sowed when they threw away decency and morality and voted for the malignant narcissist in the White House who ignores the advice of true experts and instead believes the world is a zero sum game and listens to nasty Christofascists and white supremacists.  Many of these voters are finding their health care coverage disappearing or their premiums soaring.  Now, some are beginning to lose their jobs as a result of the bully-in-chief's ill-conceived tariffs and trade war.  Things will likely get worse for them and their dilemma at some point will be whether to continue to put Trump's calls to racially inspired hatred ahead of common sense. Given the actions and statements of some of our "friends" who voted for Trump, I suspect it will be the former - its as if they've had lobotomies and can no longer see reason or even common decency.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the first job losses coming home to roost.  Here are excerpts:

The first casualties of President Trump’s trade war are 60 workers at Mid-Continent Nail, America’s largest nail manufacturer. They lost their jobs on June 15 at a factory in a part of Missouri that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The whole company could be out of business by Labor Day.

This is a potential game changer in Trump’s trade strategy, especially if it marks the start of more companies announcing layoffs. On Monday, Harley-Davidson said it will be moving some “production” offshore because of the trade war (Europe hit Harley with a 31 percent tariff in response to Trump’s steel tariffs on Europe). Harley won’t confirm whether jobs are leaving the United States, but the union representing many Harley workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, is worried.

The Trump administration has argued that these tariffs will save jobs and that the cost to America will be minor. But now there are real job losses. Now there is a human face to the pain that so many trade experts have been warning about.In Missouri, a state with a close U.S. Senate race, the layoffs are already becoming a hot election issue. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is planning a visit to the nail plant on Friday.

Mid-Continent Nail blames the layoffs on Trump’s tariffs, and the company says all 500 employees could lose their jobs by Labor Day.

The next round of cuts could come in a matter of days.The trouble for the company started at the end of May when Trump put a hefty 25 percent tariff on steel imports from Mexico and Canada. Mid-Continent had been importing steel from Mexico that American workers would then turn into nails.

After the tariff, the company was forced to hike its prices, and customers fled. Orders are a mere 30 percent of what they were a year ago, said George Skarich, the vice president of sales. He suspects many customers are now buying Chinese nails.

The workers who lost their jobs on June 15 were contract workers paid about $10 an hour, but the next round of layoffs will hit longtime employees, many of whom are making $13 to $14 an hour, plus benefits. That's a middle-class job in Poplar Bluff, where the median income is just over $31,000 a year.

[T]he vast majority of economists and business leaders have warned that many more jobs are likely to be lost than saved.

The Tax Foundation predicts 48,585 job losses from the tariffs Trump has already enacted on imports of washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum and $50 billion in Chinese products. That figure would soar to over 250,000 job losses if Trump moves forward with tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese products, the Tax Foundation said.

[S]ome parts of the country are likely to be hit hard. Europe, Canada, Turkey and China are targeting their tariffs at towns that voted for Trump.the situation in Missouri is a warning sign of how the tariffs are helping some workers and harming others, and that's tricky politics for Trump, who looks as though he is picking winners and losers.

[Trump’s] focus has been on saving jobs that make raw steel and aluminum, but there are many more jobs that are harmed by the tariffs because they turn raw metal into something else, such as a car or airplane. The longer the tariffs are in place, the more companies are likely to have to make cuts.Experts have warned Trump that the tariffs are likely to cause more job losses than jobs saved, and the early signs of that are starting to play out in small towns south of St. Louis.  As the job losses mount, so may the pressure on Trump.

Fall of the American Empire; the GOP's New Katrina

Thousands dying in Puerto Rico due to the Trump/Pence regime's failure to provide adequate hurricane relief seemingly failed to force far too many Americans to recognize the monster who had been elevated to the White House.  Thankfully, now - although at horrible human cost - the hideous force family separations going on at the nation's southwest border (Trump plans to double down on the barbarism) seem to be belatedly forcing recognize that Trump's election has triggered a national emergency while at the same time showing once and for all that the Republican Party is the party of cruelty and racial hatred.  The irony is that Trump's mind dead, racist and religious extremist base believes Trump is "making America great again" even as he destroys the country's moral standing in the world and is unraveling trade policies and alliances which will only diminish America economically.  One can only hope and pray - if one still believes in prayer - that the daily horrors will convince decent moral Americans and Hispanics in particular that they must turn out as never before and vote to defeat Republicans at every level come November 2018. While removing Trump and Pence from office may be difficult, the cancer they represent can be controlled. Two pieces are worthy of note.  One in Politico looks at how the cruelty on display may harm the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans want to talk about tax cuts. Instead, they’re talking about kids in cages.

Rather than touting lower taxes and a steady job market, House and Senate Republicans are being forced to answer for President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies — whether it’s separating migrant kids from their parents, removing DACA protections or building a border wall. And that’s likely bad news heading into November.

[A]s the White House blames Congress for the crisis at the border, GOP lawmakers are struggling to craft a proposal that unites their own party, let alone one that can win bipartisan support and become law. And with no congressional solution in sight, Hill Republicans worry that Trump’s immigration crackdown could swamp their success on the economy and overshadow all the things they want to run on in the midterm elections.

And the renewed focus on immigration is almost all self-inflicted, from Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to his relentless focus on the border wall to his “zero tolerance” policy for border-crossers, which has already led to more than 2,300 children being separated from their parents.

Hugh Hewitt, a leading conservative media voice, raised the prospect that the family separation crisis could become “the Republicans’ new Katrina and the president’s new Katrina” in an interview with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on Monday.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 66 percent of Americans who participated in the survey oppose Trump’s move to separate migrant kids from their parents. But 55 percent of Republicans back the action.

A column in the Washington Post notes in part (take the time to view the picture and see what is being done in the name of every American citizen):

John Moore may have lost the midterm elections for the Republican Party and badly damaged the reelection prospects of President Trump. Moore is the Getty Images photographer who snapped a viral picture of a crying 2-year-old Honduran girl at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. But this one is worth a million tweets. In political consequence, it is like the one taken of President George W. Bush surveying the devastation of Hurricane Katrina— by peering out the window of Air Force One. As Bush himself later acknowledged, the photo made him look “detached and uncaring.” It reinforced his frat-boy image. 

Of course, Trump is nowhere near the crying Honduran girl. But his fingerprints are all over the picture. . . . Moore’s picture is of a very special category — the pain of innocent children. It is reminiscent of the one Nick Ut of the Associated Press took of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.  

But back to the Politico piece.  Yes, you read the quote correctly: 55% of Republicans support Trump's horrific and cruel policy.  55% of Republicans support this!  Remember this on election day in November.  

As bad as the forced separation policy may be, the larger damage being done to America by the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers is even more pervasive and seems intended to end the pax Americana that has existed for 70 some years.  All so Trump can appear "tough" and "winning" to his morally bankrupt base. Here are excerpts from a column in the New York Times:

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

What do these stories have in common? Obviously they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there’s also a larger context, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. What we’re witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values — the values that actually made America great.

America has long been a powerful nation. In particular, we emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself — for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles.

By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.

But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.

The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that’s another story.) 

[T]he modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that “prosperous trade among nations” was an essential element in building an “enduring peace.” So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

So all the things happening now are of a piece. Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations.

And rejecting our ideals won’t make us stronger; it will make us weaker. We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we’re throwing all that away. . . . Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully — one whose bullying will be far less effective than he imagines.