Trade War: Oh No! There's now a larger trade deficit

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   lobobrandonposted 6 years ago

   An example of what happens when a man who does not understand stuff gets his way. This is why opinions are nothing, but opinions. Facts and economics need to be considered: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/p … ficit.html I'm pretty sure it's Irans fault. They did it.

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      promisemposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Amazing that a trade war started by the U.S. with the intention of improving our trade imbalance has actually made it a lot worse.

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         lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         I'm mind blown. I keep thinking it's an elaborate joke by the joker sitting in the White House.

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         wildernessposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         The report I saw (on the news) made it pretty plain that the primary cause of that trade deficit was a very strong dollar.  Not a trade war.
         
         Makes sense to me; a strong dollar will always produce a trade deficit - it's a pretty simple matter of price at that point.  Of course, a correlation in time can always be called causal, but that doesn't make it true.

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            lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

            Which country are you comparing to? The value of the dollar has not significantly changed year on year with respect to the Euro and the Yuan.

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               wildernessposted 6 years agoin reply to this

               As I said, that's what the news program reported.  I have not investigated what exchange rates did in the past year.

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                  lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                  Okay, because I checked just on Google the one year trend: USD vs Euro, etc. Also, the trade deficit is the highest it's been in a decade. I'm not saying trade deficit is bad, Trump says so. So it increasing must be bad too.

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            Live to Learnposted 6 years agoin reply to this

            I saw that too. Makes perfect sense, unless you want to bash the president, then it should be ignored.
            
            Reminds me of all the belly aching over no deal with NK. Now, we see the sites he was supposedly dismantling are miraculously fully operational. I'm glad the president didn't insist on an  Obama style treaty of give everything, get nothing.

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               wildernessposted 6 years agoin reply to this

               Our newspaper today listed a couple more reasons - one was the tax cut and bonuses people got - but again stated that the biggest single reason was the poor economic picture overseas and the resulting strong dollar.
               
               As you say, it makes perfect sense...unless the goal is to bash Trump, whereupon it is ignored as irrelevant.  Rather funny the way our newspaper tried SO hard to bash Trump - mentioning time and again how it was the presidents goal to lower the trade deficit and it went up - but they were at least honest enough to give a real reason rather than a "trumped up" excuse.

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                  GA Andersonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                  The points you make were also made in Brandon's linked article.
                  
                  His article seemed to boil it down to the strength of the U.S. economy and the weakness of the Chinese and European economies.
                  
                  However, even though I think Pres. Trump's position on trade imbalances is wrong, this can be a legitimate club to beat him with. After all, he did hand it to his opponents.
                  
                  GA

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                     wildernessposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                     How did he hand a strong dollar to opponents?  By making a strong economy?

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