In light of this silliness in the WaPo today (which Dean Baker already jumped on), I’m compelled to repost this piece from a little while back, explaining why and when trade deficits are problematic and when they’re not. Summarizing, it’s just as wrong to claim trade deficits of any magnitude are always a negative as… Read more

So, I’m driving around doing errands this past weekend when I hear former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez (in GW Bush’s cabinet) interviewed about renegotiating NAFTA. He’s a big booster of the trade deal and wanted to make the point that any job loss in manufacturing was a result of faster productivity growth, not imbalanced trade…. Read more

Just a quick note to say I was very glad and a little surprised to see quite a number of articles and commentaries on the problem of Germany’s large trade surplus. I was out of the box early on Trump’s “Germans are bad” rant, as I’ve long inveighed against the dominant DC notion that trade… Read more

So, at a meeting in Brussels yesterday, President Trump appears to have told leaders of the European Union that “the Germans are bad, very bad.” I’ll let those with foreign diplomatic chops figure out how to clean that up—and good luck: When I plug the Spiegel Online headline—“Die Deutschen sind böse, sehr böse”—into Google translator,… Read more

Though I’m not sure exactly who “we” are, I think we are missing a rare opportunity to better understand the pressures, conflicts, costs, and benefits of international trade. And the stakes are high: continue to get this wrong and the globalization project will face increasing insular pressures. I yield to no one in my support for… Read more