OF NOTE

Sean Dols

Knutson Construction, St. Louis Park, announced the promotion of Sean Dols to the newly-created position of vice president of field operations. Dols began his career at Knutson in 1987 as a carpenter apprentice and most recently was general superintendent.

ADVERTISING/PUBLIC RELATIONS

Collective Measures, a Minneapolis-based media agency, announced Allison McMenimen Bakken as co-president, managing director; and Luke Schlegel as co-president, CFO/COO. Interim CEO Rachael Marret returns to agency’s board of directors. … The Social Lights, a Minneapolis-based agency focused on social media marketing for brands such as General Mills, Massage Envy, Kwik Trip and Cargill, announced the promotion of Stephanie Schafer to president and chief growth officer. The agency also announced the hires of Meagan Kato, vice president of strategy; Brian Slater, senior director of content, and Kelsey Dahlager, senior director of care and engagement.

AIRPORTS

The Metropolitan Airports Commission announced the promotion of Isabella Rhawie to director of concessions and business development within the organization’s Revenue and Business Development division. Rhawie previously held the assistant director role. The Metropolitan Airports Commission owns and operates the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and six suburban reliever airports in the Twin Cities.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

New Market Bank, Elko New Market, announced the hire of Kari Johnson as assistant vice president and branch manager of its Prior Lake location.

HEALTH CARE

Children’s Minnesota, a Twin Cities-based chain of hospitals and clinics focused on pediatric care, announced the appointment of six new members to its Foundation board of directors: Joe Francis, Central McGowan; Chris Harrington, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts; Julie McDonough, Old National Bank; Hao Nguyen, Ramsey County Attorney’s Office; Nawal Noor, Noor Cos., and Emily Reitan, Project Consulting Group. … Ecumen, a Shoreview-based nonprofit provider of housing and services for older adults, announced that Tina Palmer has joined as senior vice president and chief mission advancement officer. Palmer previously was senior development officer at Fairview Foundation/University of Minnesota Foundation.

HONORS

The U.S. Small Business Administration announced it has named Mo Chang of Mo’s Tropical and Mo’s Tropical Wholesale as SBA’s Minnesota Minority Business Champion for 2024. Mo’s Tropical is a tropical fruits retailer located in North St. Paul.

LAW

National law firm Husch Blackwell announced the additions of partners Richard Morgan, Carli Pearson, Douglas Pfeifer, Tina Syring, and senior counsel Matthew Beyer to its Minneapolis office. The group joins the firm’s Technology, Manufacturing, Transportation industry group. … Fredrikson, Minneapolis, announced that attorney Danny Bihrle has joined as a senior associate in its Employment, Labor & Benefits, Employment & Labor Litigation and Class Action/Wage & Hour Litigation groups. Bihrle previously practiced labor and employment law and also served as a judicial clerk for two years at the Kentucky Supreme Court.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

SecondWave Systems, a Minneapolis-based developer and provider of ultrasound technology for medical treatments, announced Dr. Paul Peter Tak as the inaugural member of its advisory board. Tak has experience at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, Leiden University Medical Center and the University of California San Diego. … Nucleus RadioPharma, a Rochester, Minn.-based developer and provider of radiopharmaceutical imaging, announced the appointment of Chris McDonald to its board of directors; McDonald is global head of technical operations at cancer treatment provider Kite, a Gilead company.

NONPROFITS

Catholic Charities Twin Cities, Minneapolis, announced John Marston as chief financial officer. Most recently, Marston served as CFO to several behavioral health organizations, where he focused on revenue growth and sustainability.

SPONSORSHIPS

The Minnesota Twins and Thrivent, a Minneapolis-based diversified financial services organization, announced a multi-year partnership, including a new fund that provides $200,000 annually to select local nonprofits, naming rights to Target Field’s club level and a rebranded annual ticket plan.

TECHNOLOGY

AVI Systems, an Eden Prairie-based audiovisual workplace communications consultant, announced its 50th year of business, established April 1, 1974, by founder Joe Stoebner.

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EMAIL ITEMS to businessnews@pioneerpress.com.

We are seven months from probably the most momentous U.S. election in more than a century, yet we have heard little of specific economic policies each candidate proposes to follow.  A majority of the population think that the economy was better under former President Donald Trump from January 2017 to January 2021, despite economic indicators to the contrary.

Edward Lotterman

Yet, President Joe Biden has not articulated an economic platform with any specifics while Trump talks about little but his personal agenda of retribution against those he thinks crossed him. What are voters to do?

Trump is the candidate with the biggest question mark. Expect Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to continue much of the same. Their first term yielded large outlays on highways, airports and other infrastructure, regulatory mandates and subsidies to reduce carbon emissions, various ploys to circumvent Congress so as to forgive tens of billions in student debt plus greater support for labor unions.

Biden named Janet Yellen, a warhorse from the Obama and Clinton administrations, as Treasury secretary and reappointed Republican Jerome Powell, a Wall Street lawyer who had served in the Treasury in the George H.W. Bush administration, as chair at the Fed. Neither made many waves.

Trump is a mercurial character, to put it mildly, and doesn’t seem to understand or care about coherence in economic policies. Unfair treatment by other trading nations, especially Mexico and China, was the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign along with a reduction of regulation and a reduction in taxes. He imposed tariffs on imports, especially from China but also from Canada, our closest friend and ally, bypassing any action by Congress using policy loopholes created in the past by Democrats. He did ask Congress for, and got, a substantial tax cut highly skewed toward high-income individuals.

He generally left details to his Treasury secretary, Stephen Mnuchin, a once-little-known Wall Streeter who made billions from the mortgage crisis by abusive foreclosing on defaulted home loans. Trump also reappointed Powell to a four-year term as chair at the Fed.

The safest forecast is that when either is re-elected, they will largely continue policies from their first administration. Powell will stay into 2026 in either case. Biden will not precipitously replace Yellen. The question is who Trump would choose for Treasury and what policies each would stress.

There are three possibilities for Trump: recalling Mnuchin, naming some other Wall Streeter or economist, or boosting his U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, to Treasury.

The last option is tantalizing. Lighthizer is an experienced D.C.-based trade lawyer with no Wall Street connections. He served as a key Senate staffer for the committee headed by GOP Sen. Bob Dole that designed the Reagan tax cuts plus the 1983 Social Security overhaul that, among other things, raised the full retirement age. As U.S. trade representative, a quasi-Cabinet post, for Trump, he designed the tariffs on imports and the superficial overhaul of NAFTA into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.

Lighthizer clearly wants the job and has been in the news. One of his key ideas is to reduce the value of the U.S. dollar internationally, relative to other major currencies. See “Trump trade advisers plot dollar devaluation,” by Gavin Bade in the April 15 issue of Politico for details. Lighthizer is the odds-on candidate for Treasury and, if appointed, probably would push to implement the measures to lower the international value of the dollar as listed in Politico.

So what does this have to do with Minnesota, the U.S. economy in general or key sectors, including medical technology and agriculture in particular?

The answer is “a lot,” but one must start by understanding some basic terms and issues.

The “value of the dollar” is the number of units of currencies of other countries needed to buy one dollar. Most commonly, our dollar is the “reference currency” with the price as the number of Japanese yen, Brazilian reis, Chinese yuan or others needed to purchase one U.S. dollar. But it can be the number of U.S. dollars for each of the Euros used by 20 European Union countries.

Understand that for any given set of prices for U.S. goods, fluctuations in exchange rates vary the prices for each of these goods to foreign buyers. Similarly, for any given set of foreign prices, ups and downs in the value of the dollar change the cost of foreign goods to U.S. buyers.

Also, and very crucially for the Twin Cities, understand that exchange rates affect how the profits of U.S. companies with operations abroad end up on their U.S. corporate earnings statements. Several of our medical technology companies have significant subsidiaries in Europe and Asia. If the European subsidiaries of, say, Medtronic, make 10 million Euros in profits, what that contributes to the parent corporation profits in dollars can be high or low depending on the relative worths of the two currencies.

Take some examples. A $6 bushel of U.S. soybeans would have varied from 12 to 52 yuan over the last 40 years. In 2008, I ate a bad dinner in Switzerland that cost $30. Over the last 40 years, that same Swiss franc meal might have been as high as U.S. $74 or as low as U.S. $23. And, in the 25 years the Euro has been used, a $10 million profit by the European subsidiary of Medtronic or 3M might have returned anywhere from $8.5 million here or $15.7 million.

So why would a Trump administration want to lower the cost of our currency in terms of those of other nations? It’s simple: to sell more U.S. goods and services abroad and buy fewer foreign ones. This is good for U.S. producers but bad for U.S. consumers, good for farmers and med tech, bad for Target and its customers.

There are two important caveats. First, it is not just the value of the dollar versus the value of the currency of a trading partner. For a Chinese soybean buyer, it is not just what U.S. beans cost but what they are relative to Brazilian ones. So the U.S. dollar versus Brazilian real relative values are what matter. Moreover, for any particular retailer like Target, a lowering of the dollar relative to the yuan and other Asian currencies is not as big a deal as long as Walmart and all its other competitors buy similar fractions of their products from the same exporters.

Higher U.S. interest rates and the safety of our country as a place to park money in politically turbulent times increase the value of the dollar. The average exchange value of the dollar rose sharply at the end of the Trump administration then plunged with COVID. It rose sharply from early 2021 to late 2022 and then eased downward to its current position somewhat above its long-run average.

So Lighthizer, a prominent contender for a key Cabinet position in a second Trump administration, wants to somehow manipulate the international value of our currency to spur producers and retard consumers. Many questions remain. Would it benefit our economy as a whole? Can it even be accomplished, and how? What other collateral effects, especially on inflation and employment, might result? And would it do anything to reduce the large and long-term imbalances in our trade and international payments generally? Those issues must wait for a later column.

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Oh, how quickly things can change.

At one point last week, the Twins had lost five straight games and the slumping offense was searching for answers. Through the Twins’ first 20 games, they had only scored more than five runs once in a nine-inning contest.

And then, the MLB-worst White Sox came to town, and everything seemed to come together for a Twins team that had been underachieving its expectations. Saturday, the Twins’ most prolific offensive output lifted them to their sixth-straight win, once which put them back at .500 for the first time since April 6.

The 16-5 win over the Los Angeles Angels at Angel Stadium saw the Twins score in almost every single inning, and every member of the starting lineup collect at least one hit.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “I’m about as happy as I can be watching our team go out there and play the game and swing the bats like that.”

Carlos Santana hit his third home run in as many days, Max Kepler crushed his first of the season and Ryan Jeffers hit a blast off former Twins outfielder Aaron Hicks.

There were positive signs up and down the lineup, but perhaps one of the most encouraging signs for the Twins (13-13) was that slumping infielder Kyle Farmer reached base four times, with two walks and a pair of hits, one a two-run double in the third inning to push the score to 7-2.

“It’s a huge relief,” Farmer said. “ … I’ve felt the same way (at the plate). It just kind of fell for me today.”

It’s been a long time coming for Farmer, who had just three hits entering Saturday’s game and was batting .064. Farmer was one of seven Twins to finish the day with multiple hits. Edouard Julien led the way with three, driving in three runs, as well.

The offensive outburst marked the sixth straight game that the Twins have scored at least five runs, and the fifth time in six games in which they’ve plated more than five.

“Guys are feeling good,” Farmer said. “I’ve always said my entire career that hitting is contagious and guys are starting to hit well, swing at good pitches and taking balls.”

It was plenty of support for Chris Paddack, who certainly was not at his best — his velocity ticked down and he had to grind through his five innings. After the Twins scored three runs in each the second and third innings, Paddack gave the Angels (10-17) back two of those runs in each.

But with the offense continuing to pull away, the Twins were able to easily overcome the starter not being at his best.

“We’re winning as a team. You forget about my four earned fairly quickly,” Paddack said. “ … We know what we’re capable of, and it’s good to finally see some things on our side this time.”

With the offense finally starting to click, the Twins have started to see plenty of things fall on their side in recent days, putting themselves into a much different position than they were in just a week ago.

“I just like that we’re piggybacking game after game and continually doing different things, better things, playing better just as the season goes on,” Baldelli said. “I like what I’m seeing. I just want more of it.”

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