Alan Reynolds
In addition to other false claims, President Donald Trump’s recent Wall Street Journal article (“My Tariffs Have Brought America Back”) once again repeated his grandiose but mysterious $18 trillion boast: “I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal investments in America, like no other country has ever seen before.… In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.”
At the most recent Cabinet meeting, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler parroted, “The $18 trillion you brought in created an economic boom like none we’ve ever seen before. We are going to have 7% GDP growth. GDP Now is probably being underestimated where it is.” Actually, the latest GDP Now estimate, from the New York Fed, is 2.7%. But that muted “boom” was last year, and it lasted only one quarter. It tells us nothing about 2026.
No matter how often Trump minions keep repeating it, this hyperbolic $18 trillion number is still as unfathomable to everyone who has tried to explain or find it. Not one of the several hundred economists in the White House and Cabinet agencies has even tried to explain what the number is supposed to measure or how it was fabricated.
What could it possibly mean to say that Trump “brought in” $18 trillion? That number is nearly as big as China’s GDP in an entire year. Where did it come from? Where has it gone?
If some fraction of this unseen $18 trillion that “Trump brought in” was already creating an economic boom, then why hasn’t anyone shown us the booming economic statistics for manufacturing, employment, construction, or foreign investment?
The mysterious $18 trillion boast of Trump loyalists cannot mean we are “bringing in” that much actual foreign direct investment (FDI). If it did, foreigners would have to acquire an extra $18 trillion in US dollars to finance all that new US plant and equipment in the USA—either by selling us much more than they buy from us (requiring much larger US trade deficits for many years) or by selling us huge amounts of their real or financial assets (convincing Americans to invest more abroad than they do at home).
Of course, this is not happening. On the contrary, FDI was being “brought in” at a feeble annual rate of only $265.9 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 (latest available). Figure 1 from the St. Louis Fed reveals that foreign direct investment grew 23% more rapidly during the Biden years, 2021–24, than it did in the first three quarters of 2025.
Figure 1
Yet Trump nonetheless still boasts of $18–21 trillion in “secured commitments” from his coercive “deals”—unenforceable and unaffordable pledges made under threat of steep US tariffs or coercive pay-for-protection security schemes. Tariff extortion is the only way to plausibly attribute the fictional $18 trillion to his trade barriers. But the only figure the White House provided to back up his talk about incoming foreign investment was much smaller, $9.6 trillion, and only a fraction of that figure was foreign investment. Most of the investment was from US firms, and many of the foreign plans were not about investment at all.
Last year, the White House compiled a list of 132 “private and foreign investment” announcements “made possible by President Trump’s leadership.” The headline claimed $9.6 trillion [over many years] due to “The Trump Effect.” But most of the biggest investment plans were not “brought in” at all, because Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, Micron, and IBM were already here. Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, J&J, and Abb Vie were here too. Foreign and domestic drug companies do have future investment and R&D plans in the US, but they always did, long before any “Trump Effect.”
Looking over the “Trump Effect” list of $9.6 trillion, Bloomberg found only $3.5 trillion was from other countries, most of that being amorphous pledges.
Items on the list were not “commitments” either—just “announcements” apparently collected from searching the business news. Many items on the list ($2.9 trillion according to the Bloomberg tally) were not even “investments” in any sense. Some were planned purchases of US goods. Others were just routine business expenses, such as expanding or upgrading facilities, training workers, conducting R&D, and even hiring workers. But every upbeat announcement, no matter how far off-topic, was labeled a serious investment plan and added to the list of 132 “projects” attributed, as a matter of faith, to “President Trump’s leadership.”
The White House’s “Trump Effect” list of Major Investment Announcements began with this bravado:
“MAJOR INVESTMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
Made possible by President Trump’s leadership —
The U.S. has seen a surge of private and foreign investment that are fueling job growth, innovation, and opportunity across every corner of the country. Total U.S. and Foreign Investments: $9.6 Trillion.”
Unfortunately, announcements are not even commitments, much less investments.
As for the alleged “surge of private investment,” Figure 2 shows that growth of US fixed investment in plant and equipment was relatively weak last year, just as Figure 1 showed incoming foreign investment was also below par. Real investment has been rapidly falling in manufacturing structures (factories)—the opposite of the President’s familiar justification for high and erratic tariffs on imported manufactured goods (to “rebuild American manufacturing”).
Figure 2
Near the top of the list, however, is “EU Firms (Trade Deal)” $600 billion in “various sectors” for “general investment.” This is typically vague and therefore unverifiable. The “art” of this $600 billion “deal” is to be clearly unclear about who is expected to be doing what and when. There were, of course, no names of EU firms that had supposedly agreed to spend big money on various and general projects. And no actual European companies could have agreed to write such big blank checks, since private companies are not invited to political PR trade deals. Political leaders of EU nations cannot compel their private companies to invest in the US to placate Trump, nor can they promise to tax or borrow money from their own taxpayers to invest in US private companies.
Many of the 132 announcements on the White House $9.6 trillion list were not about investments at all, but about foreigners promising to buy more US products. In one so-called “investment announcement,” Japan’s largest electric power company, JERA, pledged to buy $200 billion of LNG from the US. So what? Many power companies everywhere rely heavily on US natural gas, liquified or not. This is just a Japanese import—not an investment.
India was said to be “investing” $500 billion in “mutual trade expansion.” Whatever that is, it is not an investment. Two countries agreeing to do more bilateral exporting and importing is not foreign investment in the U.S.
The largest genuine investment plans—implausibly attributed to Trump’s “leadership” or tariffs rather than to the invention of AI—are investments in “Technology & AI” by Amazon, Meta, Apple, Micron, IBM, and Google.
Other multi-billion-dollar long-term investment plans include R&D by major pharmaceutical firms. But R&D is nothing new—just doing what drug companies always do to keep growing.
Numerous other “investments” in the White House “Trump Effect” list are described as “manufacturing expansion” or “upgrading manufacturing facilities.” But that sort of investment is made all the time—even during recessions and even by companies that are shutting down other facilities. One line of that sort shows Heinz investing $3 billion to upgrade manufacturing facilities, while the next line adds Kraft-Heinz also investing another $3 billion to upgrade manufacturing facilities. Whoever did the data entry (plus their editors) evidently did not realize that they are one company, not two. Caterpillar is listed as “investing” in a “skills training program.” And McDonald’s announced “investing” in “workforce expansion” (otherwise known as hiring).
This amateurish $9.6 trillion “investment” mirage was a fanciful hodge-podge having little or nothing to do with “reshoring” in the manufacturing sector or even with Trump’s extortionary tariff shakedowns.
At some point, by the art of doubling down on meaningless nonsense, the $9.6 trillion statistical fraud somehow became magically transformed into the even more unfathomable number of $18 trillion—a figure not one of the hundreds of economists employed by the White House, Treasury, and Commerce Departments ever attempted to validate. Yet this totally imaginary $18 trillion political talking point continues to be repeated endlessly in the hope that nobody in the public or press would ever be brave enough to rudely ask for some explanation or shred of evidence.