Canadian Softwood Lumber Tariff Revisited
Canadian Softwood Lumber Tariff — what ever happened?
Big Red Car here on a drippy and rainy gray ATX day. It has been raining for almost a month.
Today, we talk about what really happened by the imposition of the Canadian Softwood Lumber 20.8% tariff back in May 2017.
Of course, the Canadians and the Americans – National Association of Home Builders – immediately began to cry foul predicting that the price of a US home would go up by $9000.
The business press said “Trump is an idiot. This will cause a huge trade war.”
Now, of course, we have some firm evidence as to what did happen. In fact, after hitting a peak of $653 per thousand board feet, the current price of lumber is $313.40/thousand board feet.
That’s right lumber has gone DOWN after the imposition of the tariff. Here is the price of a thousand board feet of lumber from the inception of the tariff until today.
