From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Peter Navarro, a professor and author who became known during the presidential campaign as the only academic economist directly advising the Trump campaign, continues to be one of the most public voices on economic matters for President-elect Donald J. Trump as he prepares to take office next month.
Last Friday, Mr. Navarro gave the transition team’s official response to the latest federal jobs report (although unemployment continued to fall, he maintained that the level of job recovery "further demonstrates an urgent need for President-elect Trump’s America First economic plan"). And later that day, when Mr. Trump broke nearly 40 years of diplomatic protocol and spoke directly to the president of Taiwan, at least one account highlighted the likely role that Mr. Navarro’s get-tough-with-China influence may have had on the president-elect’s actions.
Mr. Navarro, who is 67, is a Harvard-trained professor of economics and public policy who has been on the faculty of the business school at the University of California at Irvine since 1989. Before that, he spent two years as an assistant professor of business and government at the University of San Diego.
His ties to Mr. Trump began years before the campaign, when Mr. Navarro produced a film in connection with his 2011 book, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon — A Global Call to Action (Pearson FT Press). He sent the film to Mr. Trump, and soon got back an endorsement from the real-estate developer that called the film "right on."
This past October, a column in the The New Yorker speculated that if Mr. Trump won, "Peter Navarro would likely become the single most powerful economic adviser in the United States." The author of the piece also said he found some of Mr. Navarro’s ideas on China and trade "so radical" that he couldn’t find another economist who fully agreed with them.
Little-known nationally, Mr. Navarro attracted wider attention this summer, thanks in part to a Bloomberg View column by Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, who, while praising Mr. Navarro as a "one of the most versatile and productive American economists of the last few decades," also characterized Mr. Navarro’s recent writings on China as "a series of emotional diatribes against the Chinese government." He also wrote, "If you want to read one thinker to understand Trump on China, it is Navarro."
In an interview with The Chronicle this week, Mr. Cowen said Mr. Navarro’s broad protectionist ideas — like Mr. Trump, he urges slapping huge tariffs on Chinese goods to reduce the trade deficit — are out of step with generally accepted economic theories. "There are plenty of economists who defend some form of protectionism," said Mr. Cowen, to help a growing economy or to bolster selective industries. But "close to no one," he said, agrees with Mr. Navarro’s idea that a trade deficit is bad on its face. ...
If you were in graduate school in the late 1980s, you probably know this one: Richard Carson and Peter Navarro, "A Seller's (and Buyer's) Guide to the Job Market for Beginning Academic Economists," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 2, no. 2, Spring 1988 (pp. 137-148). It's the same guy (and the Richard Carson is the same one you might be familiar with too).
I'm no macroeconomist but (but I'm not going to let that stop me) someone tell me why we shouldn't be worried about inflation? The Fed will begin to allow interest rates to rise very soon but it will take a while to get to the point where monetary policy is no longer expansionary, taxes will fall and government (infrastructure) spending will increase sometime soon. If all three shift the aggregate demand curve to the right (when the economy is not in a recession) then prices will rise. Or am I missing something?