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1. Storm clouds on the horizon better than storm clouds overhead

   As 2018 draws to its end, there are dark clouds on the horizon. Interest rate increases spooking the stock market, the continuing trade skirmish between the United States and China (which threatens to become an all-out trade war almost ...

2. ‘Six months’ notice’ and The Art of the Squeeze

   Brian Mulroney: Mr. Turner, with a document that is cancellable on six months’ notice? Be serious… Please, be serious. John Turner: Well I have never been more serious in my life. Brian Mulroney: Please, please. That was the final ...

3. The United States calls the kettle black

   Canadians owe Donald Trump a debt of gratitude for repeatedly referring to our average 270 per cent tariffs on dairy products coming into—or trying to come into—this country. For many Canadians, that’s probably the first they’ve heard of ...

4. The end of Trump-whispering

   I wrote in January about how economists, apart from warning about the consequences, don’t have an awful lot to say about how best to fight a trade war. Adam Smith himself wrote that such wars were a situation in which policy be left to ...

5. TPP redux—The Art of the Bad Deal

   You encourage 11 of your allies to get together with you in a trade and investment deal. You impose structure and content on it. Then at the last minute you decide you yourself aren’t going to join. After they go ahead and finalize the ...

6. Is Canada’s latest NAFTA strategy too ‘insidious and crafty?’

   In Book IV, Chapter 2 of The Wealth of Nations, where he enumerates the benefits of free international trade, Adam Smith leaves only a tiny role for governments. He says the United Kingdom should support its merchant marine because ...

7. All our trade doors look unattractive now

   I’ve been reading a new paper by Oxford economic historian Kevin O’Rourke called Two Great Trade Collapses: The Interwar Period & Great Recession Compared, a title that, unlike many academic titles, pretty much catches what the paper ...

8. Trade policy as social engineering—the downside of more NAFTA vetoes

   Trade policy always involves social engineering. If you change the rules under which goods and services can come into your country, that will change who does what for a living and for how much money. To a greater or lesser extent, ...

9. William Watson: The last protectionist businessman-president also did walls—it ended badly

   Thanks to the miracle of Internet word search—and it really is a miracle, isn’t it?—I learn that the United States’ first businessman-protectionist also made speeches about Mexico and walls. It didn’t end well. In Des Moines, in his home ...

10. William Watson: There’s no such thing as a free ‘saved job.’ Or is there?

    Donald Trump started off his “Thank You” tour this week in Indianapolis with a visit to that Carrier air conditioner plant that had been such a big talking and tweeting point for him during the primaries and general election because it ...