“You have to look pretty hard to find the 'trade war' effect in the data.”

That’s a quote from Bruce Hall, referring to the period 2011 onward. For his reference, I present key indicators of the manufacturing sector during the Trump trade war.

Figure 1: Manufacturing production & non-supervisory employment (blue), aggregate hours (tan), production (green), real exports (red), all in logs 2018M07=0 (when Section 301 tariffs on China went into effect). Real exports are manufactured exports deflated by the export price index for non-auto manufactured goods, seasonally adjusted by author using Census X-13. Source BLS, Federal Reserve, Census via FRED, and author’s calculations.

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