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Marty Eichenbaum is one of my very favorite macroeconomist. He's not a household name among the public. But he's certainly a household name among every top macro economist and government policymaker at home and abroad. I copy Marty's extraordinary bio below.
This podcast covers Marty's career, his principal contributions, but primarily his eye-catching, October 2nd Wall Street Journal column -- Factories Aren't the Future. Apparently, neither presidential candidate gets a simple truth -- The U.S. Is Not a Manufacturing County and Hasn't Been One for Decades. Only 7 percent of our workforce is in manufacturing. Yet both campaigns are pretending that we can make America great again by producing every intermediate and final product we import on our lonesome here at home.
Manufacturing's share of employment was roughly 30 percent in 1950. It's declined steadily over time, including during both the Trump and Biden Administrations. Marty also debunks the myth that foreigners will pay for the 20 percent across-the-board tariffs and 100 percent Chinese tariffs that President Trump is advocating. Every decent economist will agree with Marty that an across-the-board 20 percent tariff will produce another major inflation -- possibly as high as 20 percent.
That spells a one-fifth living standard decline for everyone on a fixed income. If you're one of those folks, a vote for Trump is a vote for a massive pay or retirement income cut. To date, Biden/Harris have been no better re tariffs. As Trump points out, Biden has maintained his tariffs. Presumably Harris would as well. Unless they are truly strategic as opposed to bribes to buy votes, they should be eliminated in the process of implementing meaningful, radical tax reform.
Martin Eichenbaum is the Charles Moskos Professor of economics and the co-director of the Center for International Economics at Northwestern University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the NBER and an International Fellow of the C.D. Howe Institute.
In addition, he is a Director of the Bank of Montreal (BMO) as well as the Aaron Institute for Economic Policy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzlia. He is currently the co-editor of the NBER Macro Annual. He was co-editor of the American Economic Review as well as an associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, the American Economic Journal - Macro, and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.
He is currently a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has served as a consultant to the Board of the Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland and Chicago as well as the International Monetary Fund, Hightower Associates and Goldman Sachs. He received a PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota.
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