{"id":56600,"date":"2019-03-07T10:12:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T10:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/?p=56600"},"modified":"2019-03-07T10:12:45","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T10:12:45","slug":"trump-set-to-become-100-billion-man-as-us-trade-gap-surges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/trump-set-to-become-100-billion-man-as-us-trade-gap-surges\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump set to become $100 billion man as US trade gap surges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, is set to become the $100 Billion Man.<\/strong>
If\n the trends of the past year and economists\u2019 expectations hold true, \ntrade data to be released Wednesday will show the US\u2019s deficit in goods \nand services with the world topped $600 billion in 2018. That means \nTrump\u2019s presidency will have seen the US trade shortfall the main metric\n by which his judges countries to be winning or losing grow by more than\n $100 billion.

Economists don\u2019t like to dwell too much on the US \ntrade balance. It is, by and large, an accounting measure that often \nmoves in directions inverse to the health of the economy.

The \nmain long-term driver of persistent trade deficits since 1975 has been \nthe gap between the US\u2019s low savings rate and its attractiveness as an \ninvestment destination, fueled partly by the dollar\u2019s role as the \nworld\u2019s reserve currency. That in turn leads to a stronger dollar, which\n in itself helps increase the trade deficit by lowering the real cost of\n imports and increasing the local-currency cost of American goods in \noverseas markets.

The US trade deficit\u2019s biggest contraction on \nrecord came in 2009 when it shrank by more than $300 billion in a single\n year as a result of the recession then under way and the resulting \ncollapse in US demand for imported goods.

In the first 11 months\n of 2018 the US deficit in goods and services with the world increased \n$52 billion, or about 10 percent, from the same period in 2017. If that \npattern holds in the December data released Wednesday and economists \nsurveyed by Bloomberg predict it will the deficit will have widened to \nabout $610 billion in 2018. In 2016 it was $502 billion.

The \nimmediate drivers of the surge in the trade deficit under Trump have \nbeen the fiscal expansion resulting from the tax cuts he pushed through \nCongress and the stronger dollar that resulted, partly from the juiced \neconomy that expansion helped create.

Trump\u2019s supporters insist \nhe\u2019s tackling that via his trade negotiations with China and other US \ntrading partners. They also point to his renegotiation of Nafta as \nsomething that will help reduce the US trade deficit in the long run.

But\n Trump\u2019s trade policy also contributed materially to the growth of the \ntrade deficit in 2018. The tariffs he threatened and then imposed on \nChinese imports caused a rush by importers to get ahead of the new \nduties that fueled an increase in incoming traffic at West Coast ports \nlast year. The retaliatory tariffs Trump provoked from China also hit \nmajor US agricultural exports such as soybeans.

Moreover, his \nattacks and threats to impose tariffs on trading partners from China to \nthe European Union has also contributed to the slowdown in those \neconomies and therefore their demand for American goods.

Trump \nand his supporters have cast the blame in part on the Federal Reserve, \narguing that its decisions to hike rates last year contributed to the \nstrengthening of the dollar. Trump has complained that a stronger dollar\n has weakened his hand in his trade wars and put a damper on US growth.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, is set to become the $100 Billion Man.If the trends of the past year and economists\u2019 expectations hold true, trade data to be released Wednesday will show the US\u2019s deficit in goods and services with the world topped $600 billion in 2018. That means Trump\u2019s presidency will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56602,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56600\/revisions\/56602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}