This week, Scott Lincicome marked the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations by recruiting Adam Smith into the free-trade lobby’s war on American tariffs. It’s a clever conscription, but it depends on erasing the most important fact about Smith’s world: when Smith attacked “mercantilism,” he was attacking a system America’s founders also rejected — and replaced with something Smith never imagined.
The ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf likely led to a slight 1.2% decline in the overall goods and services deficit in April, coming in at $55.9 billion, based on Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data released on Tuesday.
The government increasingly sees critical minerals, battery materials and components, and refining as strategic industrial assets rather than low value goods often burdened by environmental regulations.
While hosting Ambassador Greer, the former USTR manipulated pay data to claim that services jobs had overtaken manufacturing.
Lawmakers from member states of the European Union agreed to measures last week to stop drug shortages and fix chronic Asian dependencies for critical medicines, this time spurred by worries over the antibiotics supply chain.
A Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship hearing held last week had only one manufacturer serving as a witness. He liked the tariffs because they stopped the bloodletting of cheaper imitations from China. However, he told the Senate that changes could be made to existing tariff policy to help lower costs as commodity and other input prices are rising fast.
The clock is ticking on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. On July 1, 2026, the three parties are scheduled to sit down for the formal “joint review” required by the deal itself. Under the terms USMCA’s drafters wrote into the agreement, the entire arrangement automatically expires on July 1, 2036 unless every government affirmatively recommits to it.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce usually takes a white-glove approach to criticising their members’ businesses in China. But in a recent study, conducted for the Chamber by the Rhodium Group, there is a marked change of tune.
A House Natural Resources subcommittee heard from witnesses last week calling for special tax breaks and for Congress to consider restrictions on copper scraps exports.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its monthly trade data for March, and despite it being the first full month of the imbroglio in the Strait of Hormuz, imports rose more than exports and the deficit surpassed the three month moving average.
