Why Trade Deficits Matter

While the strong dollar gives U.S. consumers more buying/importing power, it makes U.S. products and services more expensive, and thus less competitive in the export market. Basically, it helps some groups live above their means (and U.S. asset prices have been doing great), but it hollows out the U.S. manufacturing sector and negatively affects th

• There are all kinds of wrinkles and complications that affect trade, called “ frictions ”. These include things like home bias in both consumption and financial investing, sovereign default, currency market frictions, and so on. Economists argue back and forth about which of these frictions cause the various “puzzles” in international trade — disco

These trade deficits are self-reinforcing rather than planned. It’s not like the global reserve country necessarily decides to have persistent trade deficits. Using the United States as an example, if the whole world agrees or is forced to mainly use dollars to buy commodities and settle the majority of international deals, then there is naturally

When commodities are weak, the US Dollar is strong as producer economies underperform. They then set interest rates lower, and lose capital to the US safe haven. US Dollar based borrowing in these countries will sometimes precipitate a crisis at the same time as a strengthening US Dollar makes it harder to repay loans.

If the world is to address these global imbalances, it cannot do so without addressing the part that currency intervention and accumulation play. Some seventy years ago, John Maynard Keynes tried to get the world to understand this when he argued in favor of the creation of Bancor, a supranational currency to be used in international trade as a uni

Overall, the modern American economy is very different from the one of 1930. In fact, when it comes to trade, the two are almost opposites. The United States now has by far the largest trade deficit in history. That means Americans invest and (mainly) consume far more than they produce. U.S. consumption in the 1920s, in other words, was too low rel