No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers

My solution is that we should put in place tariffs on imports to offset what would be the overvaluation of our currency. These tariffs could come or go depending on the size of the deficit. They could also be flexibly applied to avoid unduly regressive effects on American consumers.

about our “general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” Grove’s point was that in losing manufacturing jobs, the United States also “broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandon

running huge trade deficits with the entire world year after year for decades. There are two exceptions to the understanding that bilateral deficits don’t matter. First, the content of trade can be important. For example, it is not in the interest of a large manufacturing economy such as the United States to ship basic materials overseas in exchang

As Professor Michael Pettis of Peking University and the coauthor of Trade Wars Are Class Wars argues, countries should export in order to import and increase consumption and the standard of living for their people. This is how comparative advantage and the added economic value of trade is supposed to work.