The Trade Deficit Is Not a Sign of Industrial Health or Economic Health or Anything Like That

The trade deficit is not really a sign of industrial health, economic health, or really anything else. It doesn't tell you much about how healthy your manufacturing or isoror anything like that. The other issue is that it ignores, and i think this is a real big problem of security nationalism, it ignores global supply chains. And the other problem is that bilateral trade balances kind of assumed that no other countries existd You can run a massive trade deficit with one country and then run trade surpluses with every other country. So it's unfortunate that politicians use that as a metric for judging anything relatend to trade policy.