Just heard Wilbur Ross say on Bloomberg (roughly 3:35 ET) “The President was serious about fixing the balance of payments problem of the US”. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Maybe he was determined, but he had, like Peter Navarro, no clue about how to do it.
Here’s the US trade balance defined using NIPA data.
Figure 1: US Net Exports to GDP (blue), s.a. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA 2024Q1 2nd release, and author’s calculations.
I got tired of “winning” (as defined by Trump) long ago – but for a recollection of the horrors of Trump economic policymaking, see this post.
