Nicholas Bloom: evaluation

Transcript context

…If policy uncertainty is so important for the macroeconomy pre-COVID, why was the reign of Donald Trump just fine for the American economy? Because there was high uncertainty. I woke up every morning not knowing what would happen or what would be said. I’m not sure, ex post, that uncertainty was realized until COVID, but in fact, it was realized on a massive scale. Yet ex ante, the uncertainty didn’t seem to have much of a negative drag. Donald Trump, in terms of economic performance — how would you assess it? Before COVID, it was fine. Again, I’m not a Trump supporter, so definitely don’t get me wrong. You could be mildly positive on it, saying, “Look, he took the Obama boom and continued it.” As expansions go on, maybe you think it’s harder and harder to keep the expansion going. Growth didn’t pick up, but it also didn’t slow down on the Trump. That would be a passing grade. It wouldn’t be fantastic. It wouldn’t be terrible either. One thing that aided growth on the Trump was the corporate tax cuts. There’s another political uncertainty in changing his mind all the time. Honestly, a lot of bad policy with reduced growth on the Trump. It seems to have netted out to about zero. It was no higher or no lower than in Obama’s second term. The policy uncertainty was a negative, but there were other things he did that were positive. It is also true that under Obama, there was considerable policy uncertainty because of things like the debt ceiling debate and the fiscal cliff. Who you blame is less obvious there. Congress was fighting the president. Obama wanted to pass various pieces of legislation and couldn’t. The same thing is true now, of course. We have mixed control of Congress. I think Trump made it a lot worse, to fault him quite explicitly. He just changed his mind, and he also didn’t listen to advisers. When he talked to firms, it’s very hard to predict which way a policy was going to go, because a lot of decisions didn’t seem entirely thought out, rational, predictable — I don’t know what words you’d use. Firms who complain about, “We didn’t see this coming.” He changed his mind and the tweets. By the way, US physical investment, even before COVID, was not great. You talk about the intangibles, right?…

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