“Nothing can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”….

David Glasner questions this belief that trade deficits are necessarily bad:

The ravings of a certain candidate for President — in case you have been living under a rock, I mean the one that has been having a bad hair decade — about the evils of the US trade deficits with China, Mexico, Japan, and assorted other countries reminded me of a column I wrote for the New York Times in another election year, 1984 to be exact. So I went back and looked for it, and it seemed sadly still to be relevant, so I will reproduce it here. Not that I expect it to contribute much to general enlightenment, but, at times like these, one feels that one just has to do something to resist the madness.

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Which brings to mind the following thought: the very same candidate that is promising to convert the US trade deficit into a trade surplus is also the candidate that wants America’s European and Asian allies to increase their payments to the US to cover the costs incurred by the US in defending them? How does this candidate suppose that these allies can simultaneously increase their dollar payments to the US without either exporting more to, or importing less from, the US. Or perhaps the candidate believes that these allies can just print the money with which to purchase the dollars from the US, and then pay us back with the dollars they acquired with the money they printed. But that would mean that their currencies would depreciate against the dollar. But this candidate doesn’t like it when other countries devalue their currencies against the dollar; the candidate calls that currency manipulation. My oh my, what a tangled web we weave . . .

Nice bit…

Read the article he wrote in 1984. These are exactly the kind of debates we should have in classrooms. The standard narrative usually is all deficits are bad. We hardly try and figure the entire set of issues behind trade deficits. The article by Glasner is a good start..

And yes the title of the post is picked from Adam Smith who himself was bemused by noise around balance of trade..