Maxwell School News and Commentary

"What this deal really is signaling is that this administration is going to go forward with a 25% tariff on autos," says Mary Lovely, professor of economics. "That's going to greatly upset our partners in the EU, in Japan."

"The tweet that he [President Trump] released on Monday morning where he admitted the purpose of the 2016 meeting was to get more information on an opponent...if that was the purpose of the meeting, that was clearly unlawful." He added, "now, Mr. Mueller and his team have all the more reason to want to talk to the President."

"If President Trump really wants to cut taxes on capital gains, he should go to Congress with a plan to do so directly, and not through a poorly designed back-door regulatory scheme," writes Leonard Burman, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs.

William Banks, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs, says that FBI agent Peter Strzok's testimony across multiple reports has consistently maintained that the FBI's Russia investigation was impartial and without bias.

"We’ve never seen anything like this," Mary Lovely told the Associated Press. Lovely recently spoke with multiple news outlets about the trade war between the U.S. and China.  

"Yes, we are now in a trade war," says Professor of Economics Mary Lovely. "The two sides are no longer engaged in productive talks to defuse tensions," she adds.

These new tariffs will “almost surely not” cause a recession, says Mary Lovely, professor of economics. “This industry is important but it’s not that important. Costs will rise. We’ll see some job dislocation…but we will not see a recession,” she adds.

"We've come to expect this type of ebb and flow in terms of the threat of levying trade protections against our trading partners from this administration," says Mary Lovely, professor of economics.

Professor Emeritus William C. Banks says that the recently released meeting transcripts between the Trump campaign and Russian lawyers corroborated what was already known, that "the Russians did attempt to influence the election, and they attempted to do so in favor of the candidate Donald Trump, who they hoped would win."

"The proposed tariffs will hit bilateral trade in fast-growing, knowledge-based sectors the hardest," say Mary Lovely, professor of economics, and Yang Liang, a Ph.D. candidate in economics. "Rather than hitting the administration’s intended target—Chinese firms that may have unfairly obtained American technology—the proposed tariffs would actually inflict damage on U.S. high-technology sectors."