Taking into consideration the likelihood of commensurate retaliation against American exporters, US$800 billion of US trade - or about 20 percent of total US trade in goods - could be ensnared in a trade war by year's end.
The last 13 presidents of the United States - going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed into law the watershed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934 - considered trade to be mutually beneficial for their fostering of economic growth and good relations among nations.
Those presidents aimed to avoid trade wars and committed their administrations to reducing barriers, respecting the rules, and supporting the institutions of trade.
Countries registering surpluses, Trump reckons, are more dependent upon the US market than US exporters are on theirs, making the threat of tariffs - even trade wars - an effective and powerful tool to compel foreign governments to cave in to his demands.
In any case, while it might be true that the US would be less weakened than other countries by a trade war - after all, the US economy depends less on trade than almost every other country: imports plus exports account for 27 percent of US gross domestic product compared to a world average of 53 percent - the damage to the US economy would be considerable nonetheless.
Cavalierly inviting a trade war because US "Casualties" would be lighter than, for example, China's or Europe's, betrays a worrying absence of understanding of how trade and the global economy really work.
Trump's trade policy is driven by misleading statistics and the fallacious narrative that trade destroyed US manufacturing.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/trumps-trade-wars-are-incoherent-angry-misguided
The last 13 presidents of the United States - going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed into law the watershed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934 - considered trade to be mutually beneficial for their fostering of economic growth and good relations among nations.
Those presidents aimed to avoid trade wars and committed their administrations to reducing barriers, respecting the rules, and supporting the institutions of trade.
Countries registering surpluses, Trump reckons, are more dependent upon the US market than US exporters are on theirs, making the threat of tariffs - even trade wars - an effective and powerful tool to compel foreign governments to cave in to his demands.
In any case, while it might be true that the US would be less weakened than other countries by a trade war - after all, the US economy depends less on trade than almost every other country: imports plus exports account for 27 percent of US gross domestic product compared to a world average of 53 percent - the damage to the US economy would be considerable nonetheless.
Cavalierly inviting a trade war because US "Casualties" would be lighter than, for example, China's or Europe's, betrays a worrying absence of understanding of how trade and the global economy really work.
Trump's trade policy is driven by misleading statistics and the fallacious narrative that trade destroyed US manufacturing.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/trumps-trade-wars-are-incoherent-angry-misguided
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