This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 5th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The stakes are high for restoring global supply chains disrupted by the pandemic,

but the protectionist policies of the last

administration didn't make that easy, and the current administration appears to be

in no rush to make changes to free up the movement of critical goods across the globe.

Cato Scott Linsicum warns Congress that their own efforts to direct the production and

flow of goods should be informed by the knowledge that they know precious little about the supply

chains that they imagine they can design.

When we try to evaluate the Trump years with regard to trade specifically with respect to supply chains which are put together and broken inside and outside of administrations and when they're broken putting them back together may or may not be a simple process.

But is there any way to measure that?

That is with can we measure any damage that was done by the Trump administration

with respect to supply chains? Yes there are in fact numerous now academic analyses of how Trump's tariffs in particular have caused

major problems in other sectors, in other manufacturing sectors.

Essentially, what these studies have uniformly, is that the tariffs, while they may have, while they did increase steel prices,

they caused pretty significant pain to the downstream industries using those.

And these are all again in the same supply chains because, you know, the steel being an upstream

input goes and feeds into the production of other stuff and so

yeah the the general conclusion from those studies like I said is is significant pain for very little gain because

that's the other thing these have found is that while prices spiked initially

well when prices go up you end up having less domestic demand for those products, and so demand went down, and the steel industry ended up basically in the same place it was before if not even worse you know even there were

layoffs in late 2019 right before the pandemic hit.

...