The Administration has committed itself to doubling exports in five years, via the National Export Initiative. Much of the journalistic coverage has focused on the regulatory, trade-credit financing, and export promotion measures being considered [0]. I wanted to take a macro oriented approach to the viewing the plausibility of this goal. Let me address this issue from a variety of perspectives.

The historical record

First, has a doubling of exports ever occurred in the past forty or so years? The answer is yes!

Figure 1: Ratio of nominal exports to exports 5 years earlier (blue), and real exports (red). NBER defined recessions shaded gray; assumes last recession ended 09Q2. Source: BEA GDP 2009Q4 advance release, NBER, and author's calculations.

Notice that nominal exports certainly doubled in the mid-1970s and early 1980's. Nominal exports also almost doubled by 1990 and 2008, approximately 5 to 6 years after peaks in

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What I’m reading today …

The New Face of Oil ETFs

MacroMarkets new paired oil ETFs launched last week, replacing the previous oil ETFs (UCR and DCR) that were liquidated in June after reaching their termination triggers. Unlike the popular United States Oil (USO), these paired ETFs hold cash instruments and transfer funds between each other, instead of holding oil futures contracts. The paired ETFs will track the price of crude on the NYMEX, and will transfer funds dollar-for-dollar with the price of crude. The securities will use a “reference price” of $100 crude, and the funds NAV at inception is one quarter of the reference price. The funds have a 95 basis point expense, for essentially holding cash.

What People Spend Their Tax Rebates On When They’re Too Broke to Drive

This isn’t “new”

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