(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Truth about our Trade Deficits and Trump's Brain Deficit while Global Markets Continue to Tank [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-06
Just heard Trump claim, in an impromptu questioning from the Press as he returned from one of his innumerable golfing vacations at Mar-a-Lago, that our trade deficit with China alone was a staggering 1 Trillion dollars! The above graph from Barron's indicates the true extent of the twenty largest trade deficits the US ran in 2024 with our various trading partners. Granted our deficit with China towers over everyone else, but it was still less than $300 Billion; and as the Barron’s piece pointed out:
The U.S. imported $918 billion more goods and services in 2024 than it imported, a 59% increase since 2019 when the trade deficit was $576 billion. The biggest trade imbalance is with China, which exported $295.4 billion more goods to the U.S. than it imported last year.
The Trillion-dollar reference seems to have confused our total global trade deficit (which was still significantly lower than $1 Trillion) with that of just China — but no one in the press even bothered to challenge the Liar-in-Chief on his totally outrageous and mistaken claim. Are both the Press and the President really this fundamentally ignorant of basic economic facts, or have we just grown so habituated to his firehose of falsehoods that we barely even take notice of his latest whoppers?
One curious aside about that graph — how on earth do we manage to run up such an enormous deficit with such a tiny country like Ireland ($87 Billion in 2024)? On a per-capita basis (Ireland’s population is only a bit more than 5 million), to one else is even remotely close to Ireland’s level when it comes to running a trade surplus with the US.
Meanwhile, it looks like we’re facing an absolutely awful stock market opening tomorrow, with futures trading in all the major indices (DJI, S&P, NASDAQ) down around 4% this evening. Even more worrying, the Japanese Nikkei index has already tripped a circuit breaker by falling more than 7% in Monday morning trading, suspending trading until all the sell orders can be cleared. The Korean and Australian markets don’t seem to be doing much better, and even Crypto is being hammered tonight, with Bitcoin also down about 7%, having fallen well below its presumed support level to around $78,000.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/6/2315024/-The-Truth-about-our-Trade-Deficits-and-Trump-s-Brain-Deficit-while-Global-Markets-Continue-to-Tank?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
