Tariffs, Trade, and a Misused Model

[MUSIC] Tariffs. Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. It may be the Oxford word of the year for 2025. And so surely, there is plenty of explanation from the Trump administration of how and why it came up with its tariff regime. The straight policies, we all know, is one of the most consequential important international policies, economic policies. In years and years, and yet some document describing exactly what we're trying to achieve, exactly how we're trying to achieve it. Where every calculation comes from, you know, basically doesn't exist. The methodology I'm referencing, you know, was a two-page methodology. Welcome to the pie. I'm your host, Tess Vigland. Economists are always talking about the pie, how it grows and shrinks, how it's sliced, who gets the biggest share in this show we're talking about the most pressing matters of the day, seen through the lens of economics. The pie is a production of the University of Chicago's Becker-Freeb Min Institute for Economics. And in this episode, I have one word for you, Benjamin Brattich, tariffs. I said it might be the Oxford word of the year. It might even be the Sesame Street word of the year. Ask any five-year-old right now, what's in the news? And they might say tariffs. The Trump administration imposed a massive set of tariffs back in early April. Since then, they've brought some of those down. Some are set to possibly be reimposed. It's hard to say. But we're all living with it. And today's guest really lived with it in those first few days of Terrafmania, because the Trump administration claimed it had based some of its calculations on his research. But they didn't exactly get it right. So we're going to hear what that research really found. And what our University of Chicago economist thinks of how this Terraf regime is going and how it might affect all of us in the weeks and months and possibly years ahead. My name is Brent Nyman. I'm the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics here at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. So Brent, you finished up serving in the Biden administration. A few months ago, you were a Deputy Undersecretary of Treasury for International Finance. And you came back to Chicago from DC. I imagine you thought you'd get some distance from policy. But no. You woke up on what, April 3rd or 4th, to find out your research was being cited as the math behind the Trump administration's Terraf plans, which was, I think, a surprise to say the least. Tell us what happened. Well, I'll actually back up, I guess, a few days before the announcement, but maybe a week before I was at a sort of small conference. And my job there was essentially to give my take, my best guess as to what the reciprocal tariffs, which were going to be announced on Liberation Day on April 2nd, would look like. And those particular tariffs were sort of pitched as reciprocal tariffs. The spokesperson of the administration, at some point, said they'd be sort of golden rule tariffs, which was meant to reference the golden rule of the Bible. Do others exactly. So you can think of what is it that other countries do that sort of limits or puts frictions into US exports to their economies? And the simplest things you'd look at, their tariffs on our exports to them. And most estimates that I found credible you only put that at maybe a percentage point or two of the difference. Maybe there's a handful of countries out there that are large that charge a few percentage points above us, many charge in line with us. So I didn't think that'd be a particularly big deal quantitatively. I thought they might add on top of that maybe a handful more percentage points to account for estimates of non-terrif barriers. And this is a lot more fuzzy. It's almost kind of by definition harder to observe and measure. But it is the case that there are trade frictions out there that aren't just tariffs. So maybe countries have different rules or regulations on what food can go into their country or standards for transportation that crosses the border, things like that that can effectively serve as a tariff. So I thought it would be even higher by a few percentage points than that. But the bottom line was I told this, kind of distinguished crowd of people. I estimated what the tariffs might look like in size and also in scale. I knew that they would hit China. I thought they probably would hit Europe. But I didn't think it would be all that broad nor all that big. You didn't think Sri Lanka would be on the list? I didn't think Sri Lanka would be on the list. I didn't think a lot of countries which I just didn't have top of mind at all when I thought of this potential national emergency which is what the administration ultimately declared due to deficits. It was a Zambia. I didn't think of Bangladesh. I didn't think of it, etc. And so on April 2nd, when this announcement was made, it was like, wow, I was really, really off. The numbers were much, much larger and the set of countries hit was just much, much broader than what I had imagined. And then, like you said, within a day, they put out the methodology. Or at least I was made aware of the methodology on where they all got this. And one of the papers, they didn't cite very many. And one of them, though, was my own work co-authored with Alberto Cavallo and Gita Gopinath and Jenny Tang. And so I sort of dug in and was trying to understand where they got their numbers and certainly how they could link it to any research that I had done. That's kind of how I got standing to comment on these tariffs and this really consequential economic policy. Pulled into something you really were not expected to be pulled into. That's right. So the study that they cited was one that you and your co-authors did on tariffs on Chinese exports in 2018 and '19. Can you just walk us briefly through what your findings were there and then how did the US Trade Office interpret or misinterpret them? Yeah, so the, you know, the 2018-19 tariffs that President Trump and his first administration his first term put on against China. It was a natural question to ask what happened to prices. You know, there was a lot of discussion at the time who pays for these tariffs. And, you know, as a theoretical matter, it's certainly possible that foreign exporters pay for part or even a large portion of the tariffs. The idea is, you know, if you put a 10% tariff on imports and the exporter drops their price by 10% because they're worried about losing market share. They don't want their customers to pay more and therefore demand less. Any of those drivers could, in fact, lead to a case where the foreign exporter pays the tariff in an accounting sense. But, in fact, our paper sort of looked and measured and found that US importers actually ended up paying, again, in an accounting sense for the tariffs that were put on in 2018 and 2019. What we basically showed is that the export prices didn't really move. So, for example, if there was a 20% import tariff placed on Chinese shipments to the US, we found that the exporter's price dropped by only about 1%. So, if you take that decline of 1%, and you combine it with the additional 20% tariff, it meant that US importers were paying essentially a 19%-inch point higher total price, including that tariff. That was one thing that we found. Another thing we found, you might think that the pass-through, and this is the effect that tariffs have on prices, people sometimes refer to as the tariff pass-through, you might think that pass-through rate is kind of the same everywhere, but we studied, in fact, what happened when China retaliated and put tariffs on their imports from the US. And interestingly enough, we actually found that US exporters dropped their prices by a much more substantial amount, accounting for closer to half of the impact of the tariff. So, it doesn't have to be that this is some physical constant that applies everywhere in all ways. It will depend on things like the elasticity of demand, the sensitivity or strength of demand that next-porters' customers have for their goods, among other factors. Then the last thing we did was try to look at what it meant for customers. Ultimate, I shouldn't say customer, a retail customer. Consumers. Well, some of the consumers, some of the users of imports from China, let's say, are businesses. A lot of the imports are intermediate inputs. So, like auto parts. Vessment goods, auto parts, things like that, sure. They also could include equipment like machinery that's used to produce machine tools or any number of things that would be part of a manufacturing process. But we wanted to get some sense for what it might have looked like for, people like me and you that go to the stores and shop online at Amazon and see what happened for retail goods like that. And so, for that purpose, we looked at two big box retailers where we have an idea how we could essentially scrape their prices online and distinguish between those goods that came from China and therefore would have been hit by these tariffs. And those that didn't come from China and therefore wouldn't have been hit. So this would be like a Costco or a Sam's Club, something like that. Something like that, that's right, that's right. And I do want to be clear that this is not representative of the full basket. It's a tough exercise, but we did our best. And interestingly, we found that actually prices there didn't really move almost at all. So you have this combination of patterns where at the border, whoever is doing the importing into the US is paying. But a lot of times that must have been firms that then for whatever reason didn't pass that on to the consumer in the period of time that we were able to study. And one, there's a number of things that could lead to that. One thing we emphasized is that you could imagine substitution in the supply chain that these big box retailers shifted from buying from China to other countries. And in fact, we show evidence that that was indeed the case. One reason why I think this time might be different in terms of the past through all the way to the retail customers that almost by definition the goal of these newly announced reciprocal tariffs is to eliminate bilateral deficits, to eliminate deficits country by country with with all of our suppliers. So for example, one key shift that we know occurred in the last five years is a lot of goods that we used to purchase from from China. We now purchase from other countries, whether it's let's say India or Vietnam. And sure enough, if you look at the initially announced tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs on Vietnam, they're among the highest of all the trade partners precisely because of that. So I do think this ability to substitute is going to be diminished this time around. And that's one of the key differences if we try to think about the impact on consumers last time versus this time. So then again, how did the US Trade Office interpret that research or again, misinterpret? Let me step back and first make the most important critique of the methodology that was used. And then I will tie it to my work. But the most important problem in my view is that the goal of these tariffs and the goal embedded in the formula that was used to calculate these tariffs was to eliminate deficits country by country, so called bilateral deficits. So it's not just that the US wouldn't have a deficit with the rest of the world, but that the US wouldn't have a deficit with China, with Europe, also with Zambia, with Mexico, with Jordan, with every single country one by one. And the basic flaw with that logic is exactly what should be intuitive if we think about our day-to-day lives, which is that we don't have. We have deficits all the time all over the place with our local grocery store, with our dry cleaners. In a modern economy, it's a very rare occasion where you meet someone that is willing to sell you something in exchange for what you sell them. Right. We don't have a barter economy. We don't. So that is an extremely damaging premise. I quoted a Nobel Prize winner in an op ed, I wrote, named Bob Solo from MIT, who said he has a chronic deficit with his barber, who doesn't buy a darn thing from him. And that's the key idea. There's nothing in that anecdote that suggests that Bob Solo's barber was doing anything unfair or ripping him off. And if the goal is to never have chronic one-way spending patterns, you can do a tremendous amount of harm, particularly in a modern economy. So then, how was this misinterpreted by the US trade office? Like, if we assume that just at base, the whole idea was faulty, where did your research come into to what they were doing? Right. I had promised I'd get to the part where they cited my research. So, there is this formula that they create on the basis of trying to close bilateral deficits. And in this formula, of course, one of the key inputs is the actual bilateral deficit itself, just data on how much does the US buy actually in goods they focused entirely on, but from another country more than what you sell to that other country. But to sort of operationalize this and ask what would be the tariff rate that you'd need to close that deficit, they also need some parameter values. And one key parameter value is that pass-through that we had talked about before, the pass-through rate from tariffs to import prices. So in particular, the question is, you know, for a 100% increase, or 1%, let's say, increase in import tariffs, how much do prices face by the US importer change? And that's a parameter that was 95% in the research that I did with my co-authors. That 95% is calculated given what we had just discussed earlier, as I had said that the US importer would pay a 19% percentage point higher price inclusive of the tariffs if a 20% tariff were imposed. That's the combination of a 1% decline in the exporter's price and a 20% increase in the tariff. So that's a 95% rate. And again, this was based on you were looking at what happened in 2018 and 2019. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, the administration instead used a number of 0.25, which is about one-fourth of the size. And as a result, the calculated tariffs that they got were essentially four times as large as what they would have gotten if they used the number 0.95 from our paper. Do we know where they got the 0.25? Well, first just to be concrete on what this four times looks like because it really does make a difference. Japan, the president is out there in the Rose Garden and he held up a sign that had under, you know, next to Japan a number like 46%. You know, really big number. Just to be clear on how big this difference would be if they instead had used 0.95 instead of 0.25, it would have been down to 11 or 12% instead of 46%. You know, it's a giant difference. And even if I don't want to, like I said earlier, this 0.95 is not some physical constant or something that can't change over time or space or policies. But even if it was, you know, as low as 0.75, let's say, you still would have gotten a number closer to 15% than the 46% tariff that was shown in this case for Japan. And to answer your question, do I know where it came from? No, I really don't. So among this whole thing, you know, one element I find most surprising, you know, and frustrating as an academic that's really interested in policy making is, you know, the straight policies, we all know is one of the most consequential important international policies, economic policies in years and years. And yet some document describing exactly what we're trying to achieve, exactly how we're trying to achieve it, where every calculation comes from, you know, basically doesn't exist. You know, it was very short, light on details. I think the total citations were, you know, in the order of four or five papers. I would have expected a very substantial, very careful document that, you know, would have been, hopefully or ideally, you know, vetted quite broadly ahead of time. And instead, I think, you know, it wasn't and that's what led to to these kinds of dynamics. The really positive news here was, I think, the concern that I had, that this calculation one didn't make sense. And two, even taking it on face value wasn't sort of implemented correctly. I think it was a point made quite broadly and in fact across the political spectrum. I think business leaders pointed it out. There was an influential posting and paper by AEI economists pointing this out. I think the-- AEI, not right, American Enterprise Institute, not AEI. No, no, AEI. I hope I said that. That's right. No, just want to make sure the listener here. Absolutely. You know, it's a prominent-- Not AEI economists. From the right of center, I think Tank pointed out essentially the same thing. And, you know, I think that, at least I hope to think that led to the pause of the reciprocal tariffs at that point for 90 days. We're about halfway through the pause now. But, you know, I certainly preferred the pause to the status quo, at least as of then. So, Brent, these tariffs were a lot bigger and much broader than you had expected. Were there other features of them that stood out to you? Well, I mean, first just to try to summarize exactly how big and broad they are. I think that is worth doing. Just sort of contextualizing this. The tariffs when they were initially announced, I think brought the average rate to something like 20 percent-- or maybe 25 percent, in fact, if I'm remembering it correctly-- closer to 25 percent, which was, you know, would have been rates higher than anything we'd seen in the US, you know, for something like 150 years. I think we're things stand estimates, I think, from the Yale Budget Lab. suggests it's closer to 17%, which still gets you back to the 1930s or something like this. So I think it really bears noting that these are really, really enormous increases in tariffs. Furthermore, some of these comparisons aren't even that helpful, or at least in my view, they significantly underestimate the implications because 90 years ago, 150 years ago, what we did with trade was totally different. Right. Smooth Hawley has been cited a lot. It's true, but it's also the comparison doesn't work for a number of actually very easy to understand, but quite important reasons as well. Back in kind of smooth Hawley era, or even further back, which some of the comparisons go back to, you know, trade just wasn't nearly as big a deal as it is today. You know, we import about 14% of GDP worth of goods and services, about 11% goods, and you know, trade was just much less large as a share of our economy back then. And so even if the tariff rate is the same, it's hitting a much, much higher share of goods today than it did then. And then furthermore, you know, the way in which a higher priced import matters is very different. 100 years ago, a much larger share of what we imported were what we would call final goods. Think of them as bananas, or even it could be computers, although not then. But you get the idea of things where, you know, you buy them and then you use them and that's it. But nowadays, a very large share, in fact, a majority of our trade is in what we would call intermediate inputs. Things that themselves are used in order to produce final goods. And so again, auto parts. Auto parts is a great example. And in fact, auto parts is a particularly great example because sometimes those inputs, in fact, also then are exported and re-imported several times, make the rounds across many borders, you know, before they're actually used in the final goods. And so, you know, in this sense, unlike 150 years ago, you know, when we put a tariff on imports, we hurt our own productive capacity. It's not just our consumers, but even our ability to produce. And furthermore, you know, the predictability and the ability to make sure that we're administering things properly and efficiently also becomes vastly more complicated in today's world where supply chains, cross borders, multiple times, etc. So I think it is instructive to suggest how big these import tariffs are by saying, look, this is, you know, we're now at rates that we haven't seen for 80, 90 years or more. I think that's kind of helpful. But people should, you know, understand that it might very well go much beyond that in terms of their ultimate implications because trade is just a bigger deal for our economy now than it used to be. And what about the authority that the government used in order to impose these, the IEEPA? Can you tell us the significance of that? Yeah. So I think actually, let me, let me step back for a second and just talk about how in terms of the motivation and the authorities used, these tariffs relate to much broader set of policies. In fact, some things that would be non-economic policies and that's a fairly new thing. So I think the cleanest example of this is you saw early in the administration, there was a threat by President Trump to impose tariffs on Columbia when Columbia didn't agree to cooperate in the way that President Trump was looking for on a, I think a migration, a deportation related policy. And tariffs there were used as a threat, having nothing to do, of course, with kind of any economic force. And there's even been sort of secondary tariffs proposed where, you know, the idea is United States will put a tariff on countries that themselves import oil from Venezuela in violation of US sanctions. So this is another example where, you know, tariffs are being used and conceived of as a tool with goals that are much broader than sort of conventional economic goals that economists often would think about. I think that's a new issue that we need to really grapple with. Yeah, I mean, fentanyl comes to mind for me, they really talked about using tariffs as a crackdown for countries that aren't doing enough in their eyes to prevent fentanyl from coming into the US. Absolutely, absolutely. So the initial tariff wave on, or tariffs placed on China, Mexico, and Canada were authorized or justified on the basis of a national emergencies related to immigration and also fentanyl. And a really important repercussion of that is that the authority IEPA, which, which was used to, to have these policies, these tariffs, IEPA stands for the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. And this is a 1977 act that previously had not been used for tariffs. So there's actually an active legal case asking, questioning whether in fact IEPA grants the executive, the authority to impose tariffs. I'm not a legal expert here or a lawyer, but I think the core of the issues that the text of the act uses the word regulate, but does not use the word tax or tariff. But one really important implication of this is that it's really easy, much easier than in the past to impose tariffs and much faster to impose tariffs. And I think at the 301 investigation, section 301 investigations, which was the authority used to put the tariffs on China that we talked about during Trump's first administration, you know, it took, I don't know, in the ballpark of a year between clearly expressing a desire to at least potentially put on those tariffs and actually doing so. We've already seen in the last couple months that IEPA facilitates incredibly rapid and times incredibly large tariffs to be imposed, you know, from day to day, there can be huge swings. Again, because of their interpretation of what IEPA grants the president authority to do. And so that's also another really massive change in something, you know, I think the ruling on whether that's allowed or not will be really consequential. And it'll be consequential for essentially all trade negotiations moving forward as well, because the value of reaching a trade agreement with the United States will mean a very different thing. If it's interpreted that the president could now or in the future in any administration could invoke IEPA to massively deviate from whatever terms were agreed. All right. Well, there was a pause placed on some of the reciprocal tariffs, even maybe a shorter time frame. I don't know. I left the country for a while. And the tariffs were on tariffs were off tariffs were back on again and then they were off again. I'm wonder if you might be able to kind of track it for us. Where do things stand now? And I'll say that you and I are speaking on Monday, May 19th. Everything could be different by the end of the week. So can you give us a sense of where we are now and particularly kind of what historical timeframe we are in. Will economists and historians look back on this as as a blip or as something significant. Right. Well, look, as you alluded to, it's changing at very high frequency. And it's not trivial to calculate, for instance, day to day, you know, what the average import tariff rate is, et cetera. So, you know, I would reference kind of our earlier discussion on how to think about the aggregate scale of, you know, these tariffs all put together and how, you know, they really do sort of stand out from any time period for, you know, at least 80, 90 years. Very broadly, the reciprocal tariffs that were announced on April 2nd, you know, there was a 90 day pause put in place. But as recently as this past weekend, you know, the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent basically said, look, we need to see deals or at the end of that 90 day period, you know, some of these higher higher tariff rates may become unpause, you know, may may come back into effect. So sort of, you know, kind of reminding us and the world that this is all still on the table. Temperature. Yeah, you were about halfway through those 90 days, but I one can't help but notice that the 90 days expire pretty close to the 4th of July. So we'll have to see, but I'm really kind of concerned on what happens there with China, we had really just an absolutely remarkable sort of striking scaling up of tariffs both by, by the United States on Chinese imports and then retaliatory response of China on US imports. It went up very quickly from a situation where both economies, I think had, you know, tariffs in the order of 20% very quickly to one where US had 145% tariffs on China and China had 125% tariffs on the US. Things have come back down. I think the US tariff rate right now stands at 30% on China, but again, you know, this is our third largest trading partner. This is an absolutely, you know, massive tariff judged against essentially any other other reference point. So I certainly do still hope that there's a lot more room for that to come down. There have been suggestions. in some cases, you know, orders for investigations, you know, sort of proposals for further tariffs in a number of other sectors. So pharmaceuticals is one, I think copper was another, critical minerals more broadly. You know, there's a number of sectors where it's already been signaled, frankly, that the administration is quite interested in more tariffs. So we'll have to see where things go, but we're certainly not in a space where with any confidence, we can say that this is the tariff regime, you know, that's here to stay and last for several more years. So I think we'll get a lot of changes even between now and the next two, three months. Given exactly what you've just said, I wonder if you could talk about the longer-term impact of these last couple of months, whatever's coming in the next couple of months and beyond with all the uncertainty, it's affected everything from the stock market, wild swings there to the dollar where there's actually been some speculation that the world might look for a different reserve currency. What does that do potentially to global confidence in U.S. policymaking and in the U.S. economy? Yeah, I mean, look, uncertainty, it's something that, you know, causes weight and seed behavior. And this is very intuitive. You just think about making a purchase or investment that you might make that's supposed to be long-dated, do you buy a house? Well, you need to have some certainty over what your mortgage rate's going to be and whether the schools in that neighborhood are going to be suitable for your family and, you know, whether you're going to be employed and be able to make payments, all these sorts of things, if you have absolutely no idea and you can't project out for at least a few years, you're probably just going to wait and see. To a very similar extent, I think that's what we all are worried is happening in the global economy. You might be interested in building a factory in the United States if you knew that you couldn't more cheaply source from abroad, which certainly would be the case if tariffs on China were prohibitive, like they were for quite some time. On the other hand, if you see it changing all the time and you think that the outcome is actually going to be, you know, kind of a deal, where in fact those terrafrates aren't prohibitive and it still makes sense to produce abroad. Well, then it will have been a mistake if you build a factory in the United States. So this sort of uncertainty is leading to a lot in the weight and the sea behavior. And, you know, the more weight and sea behavior there is, the less hiring there is, the less purchase of investment goods, you know, the less of the sort of innovative activity and growth enhancing potential that we plow into our economy. And that could slow things down quite a bit. We haven't really seen data conclusively showing, you know, that this is happening. So we have to kind of wait and see. But I think most compelling to me has been a lot of the surveys, a lot of the more kind of softer but higher frequency data points that you hear things like when regional Federal Reserve presidents talk about what they're hearing in their districts, you know, they're repeatedly talking about this uncertainty holding back hiring an investment. And that's the sort of thing that has me be quite worried. And certainly if you look at the professionals, you know, the forecasters out there, whether it's kind of cell side forecasters at investment banks, you know, places like the IMF that do this for their jobs. I mean, projected future growth both in the United States and around the world has really been hit. And I think it's also noteworthy that, you know, the United States certainly has had downgrades in the forecasts of growth, pretty significant ones due to this trade policy. But a lot of the other countries that we are imposing tariffs on are getting hit to an extent that's much, much larger. And that I think we need to appreciate the forecasts of countries like Canada or Mexico when they were initially, you know, sort of threatened with these really enormous tariffs were downgraded, you know, to a tremendous extent where it wasn't just the probability of recession, you know, moving up a little bit. It was instead, you know, entering territory where you'd actually expect really large dislocative recessions. And I think it's easy sometimes to lose that when you're sitting in the United States, which is actually a relatively closed economy that's relatively less reliant on imports from the rest of the world. But some of these threats on other countries are really quite serious and devastating threats for their well-being. I think it's important to keep in mind that if we're, you know, going to entertain things like that, it's sort of the juice should be worth the squeeze. We better have in mind something really, you know, productive and important that it's worthy to use this tool to try to achieve. So, Brent, how might this all end? Do you see a way forward here? Right. I mean, it's quite hard to know and certainly it's hard to know officially what the administration says it's looking for are these deals. And it's hard to know exactly what would constitute in the administration's views as successful or sufficiently useful deal or not. But in the meantime, I worry about a few things. You know, one is it's very possible that the way in which tariffs are not brought down sort of on the books in the headlines, but effectively our brought down is through, you know, kind of exemptions, the sorts of things we've seen so far, certain goods or certain companies getting carve-outs. And I do just want to note that that's problematic for a few reasons. It might be better than the alternative of no carve-outs, but compared to a policy that that simply is more narrow, more targeted toward a particular problem that you're trying to solve, policy by exemptions can often be quite inefficient policies. The companies or products that typically get the exemptions are often those that have some, you know, either scale or access, which allows them to make their case with the administration. And it doesn't have to be correlated with exactly where in the economy the exemptions would be most economically efficient to grant. And similarly, you know, it can give rise to sort of favors and cronism for any administration that's in power, you know, if industry knows that absent staying on their good graces, there can be a penalty enacted through trade policy that can be a real, a real concern. So that's sort of one thing I would note. I also think we'll have to see what happens with the AIPA court case. So that might be one other way that this ends and things slow down is if this authority that's been used to be able to enact very high frequency and large changes in trade policy is taken away. That would be another way in which things could change. All right. Britt and Iman, thank you, but I'm not going to let you go yet. Are you ready for a lightning round? Let's give it a try. Okay. What books are book? Are you reading right now or would you recommend? Well, I so I'm not done with it, but I imagine I will recommend it. But I've been hearing for months about Ken Rogoff's new book called Our Dollar, Your Problem. Ken was my PhD advisor when I was at Harvard and is just an unbelievably generous advisor. Always pay a lot of attention to how he thinks about things and what he's his new research shows and this book seems both super timely and written by an authority. I can't imagine a more authoritative person than Ken Rogoff to write about the dollar or more interesting time to be reading about it. So that's on my bookshelf and so far chapter one was really fun and interesting. So I would recommend chapter one and I imagine by the time I'm done, I'll recommend the book as well. That's right. That's right. What course changed your life as a student? Huh. So I may have had a lot of amazing courses, wonderful teachers. I'll give a slightly different, I guess, different answer than what I what one might expect. But when I was in middle school, I was actually interested in drama. So I enjoyed the speech course and I participated in middle school plays. This is very, very far from directly related to what I do now, which is research in international economics. But I do think made it helpful to do things like teach, to feel comfortable, you know, presenting in front of college, being on stage. And so I do think I would give a shout out, I suppose, to to that part of my educational background. Are you a fellow Thessian? So I kind of gave it up. I think it gave up on me. You know, I was a nice nice singing voice at some point in my life and I no longer did pretty quickly. So no, I'm no longer a Thessian and I believe a lot in comparative advantage and that is clearly not my comparative advantage. So I don't think I will anytime soon. But I can look back at that helpful class back from my younger years. I love that. I love answers that go out of left field like that. And finally, Brent, if you had to make a pie with the current contents of your kitchen, what would it be? If I had to make a pie with the current contents in my kitchen. So I only know how to barbecue. I can't cook anything else. So it would not be a very delicious pie. It would be a pie with, you know, barbecue mitzs and tongs and flippers and smoker chips. So you could say it would be a pie with steak or pork or chicken. I guess that's right. So if it can be a savory pie without the crust. Absolutely. We'll graduate today. That's right. I rely on others to make the pie. But I'm a barbecue guy. Fair enough, it sounds delicious to me. Brent Niamen, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Nice to speak with you, Tess, thanks for having me. The pie is a production of the Becker-Freeman Institute for Economics and part of the University of Chicago podcast network. If you'd like to keep in touch with the latest economic research from the University of Chicago, you can visit bfi.ucikago.edu/subscribe. Have you ever wondered what goes on inside a black hole or why time only moves in one direction? Or what's really so weird about quantum mechanics? Well, you should listen to why this universe. On this podcast, you'll hear about the strangest and most interesting ideas in physics, broken down by physicists Dan Hooper and Shama Wachsman. If you want to learn about our universe from the quantum to the cosmic, you won't want to miss why this universe, part of the University of Chicago podcast network. Our theme music was composed by story mechanics, production assistants from the BFI Communications team. I'm Tess Vigland, your host and executive producer. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.