03/28/2024

Is President Trump misfiring on trade?

Besides promising to build a big, beautiful wall and to lock up Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump loved to lob threats on trade on his way to the White House.

But there’s a school of thought that his protectionist America First policy is all wrong – that his executive order to identify “every form of trade abuse” by country and product to reduce the U.S. trade deficit won’t help American workers.

Some economists say that the real problem is a global imbalance caused by 10 to 20 nations that have built huge trade surpluses – and that the single most significant cause is their undervalued currencies, while the strong dollar hinders U.S. exports.

Trump’s executive order, and a second one that focuses on uncollected import duties, could produce a few “tweetable” wins, but won’t fix the trade deficit, Robert E. Scott writes for the Economic Policy Institute.

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