The January meeting of the American Economic Association is to economics nerds what Star Wars conventions are to George Lucas fanatics. It's an opportunity for more than 13,000 of them to cram into hotels to swap ideas, make new friends and catch up on research.

Justin Wolfers prowled the halls. An Australian expatriate who's professor of economics at the University of Michigan, he told the Australian forecasting conference in Sydney this week: "There are more handsome people blessed with amazing social skills in that one building than you'll ever see anywhere else."

He asked them what was going on.

"Over the course of four days I literally did not meet a single North American economist who thought that anything good for the US was going to come out of the Trump administration," he said. "Not one."