Most of us know about FRED, the Federal Reserve Economic Data hosted by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. It provides data and graphs at your fingertips. You can quickly grab a graph for a report or for a online argument. Of course, you can learn from it too. I’ve talked in the past about the Excel and Stata plugins.
But you may not know about the FRED FRASER. From their about page, “FRASER is a digital library of U.S. economic, financial, and banking history—particularly the history of the Federal Reserve System”. It’s a treasure trove of documents. Just as with any library, you’re not meant to read it all. But you can read some of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a news story and lamented the lack of citations – linked or unlinked. Some journalists seem to do a google search or reddit dive and then summarize their journey. That’s sometimes helpful, but it often provides only surface level content and includes errors – much like AI. The better journalists at least talk to an expert. That is better, but authorities often repeat 2nd hand false claims too. Or, because no one has read the source material, they couch their language in unfalsifiable imprecision that merely implies a false claim.
A topical example would be the oft repeated blanket Trump-tariffs. That part is not up for dispute. Trump has been very clear about his desire for more and broader tariffs. Rather, economic news often refers back to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 as an example of tariffs running amuck. While it is true that the 1930 tariffs applied to many items, they weren’t exactly a historical version of what Trump is currently proposing (though those details tend to change).
How do I know? Well, I looked. If you visit FRASER and search for “Smoot-Hawley”, then the tariff of 1930 is the first search result. It’s a congressional document, so it’s not an exciting read. But, you can see with your own eyes the diversity of duties that were placed on various imported goods. Since we often use the example of imported steel and since the foreign acquisition of US Steel was denied, let’s look at metals on page 20 of the 1930 act. But before we do, notice that we can link to particular pages of legislation and reports – nice! Reading the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act’s original language, we can see the diverse duties on various metals. Here are a few:
- Manganese: $1.875 per pound & 15% per value
- Tungsten: $0.60 per pound & 50% per value
- Chrome material: $0.025 per pound & some at 30% per value
- Barium Alloys: 25% per value
- Steel Ingots: 20% per value
- Tin-Plated Steel: $0.01 per pound
The above list is highly incomplete. Metals alone include 98 paragraphs of duty categories, many of them stipulating special cases and multiple rates. What a mess! And that’s just metals. One positive thing about the not-quite-proposed Trump tariffs is that a blanket 25% per value would include much easier compliance costs. But, as we know, the devil is in the details and we are probably not going to see such a simple rule imposed. Special interests are sure to get in line at the trough in order to get their carve-out.
One upside to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which is often presented as comprehensive, is that it enumerated many duty-free items. Many of the below items enjoyed duty-free status as least since the Underwood Tariffs in 1913. Such items included:
- Manufacturing acids
- Agricultural Implements
- Bananas
- Bibles
- Breads
- Books for government use, use by institutions, and for blind people
- Gold or Silver Bullion
- Coal
- Coffee
- Cotton
- Gunpowder
- Jewelry
- Eggs
- Barbed Wire
- Wood
Again, this is an incomplete list. There are 214 paragraphs that detail the exceptions. While complexity in the tax code is not good, lower tariffs are. There is plenty of good reason to deride the economic wisdom of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But, it was not a blanket tariff on all goods. How do I know? I bothered to look. You can also peruse any of the 174 pages of the Smoot-Hawley tariff Act – or thousands of other documents. Thanks to the FRASER digital library.
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