Comment by vidarh

One of the things that becomes apparent if you look at GDP relative to political upheaval in various countries is that stability matters more than any given political direction for the economy. That's not to say specific policies do not matter, but they matter much less than I wish they did.

I don't know if the upheaval Trump is causing is sufficient in scale that it will be visible in US growth rates.

But the point is that business will adapt to pretty much any regime to various degrees if it is predictable. The US used to be predictable. Now it's increasingly looking unpredictable, and that could potentially become a much bigger problem than any specific policy Trump puts in place.

(For an extreme example, compare China under Mao and under Deng: Both periods saw lots of year on year growth, but under Mao there were cataclysmic resets whenever there were political upheaval before rapid growth eventually resumed and those resets massively harmed the long term growth average; more than Deng's economic reforms, the biggest change was a long period of predictability)