Trump's trillion-dollar investment promises face skepticism

President Donald Trump strong-armed America’s biggest trading partners into pledging trillions of dollars of investment in the United States. But a study out Tuesday raises doubts about whether the money will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did. “How realistic are these commitments?’’ write Gregory Auclair and Adnan Mazarei of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The short answer is that they are clouded with uncertainty.’’ They looked at more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.