The surge in the U.S. goods trade deficit extends a surge in offshoring that has eliminated more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and nearly 70,000 factories since 1998, with overlooked costs for Black workers and other workers of color, as we describe in this new EPI report.

While both imports and exports were depressed in 2020 due to the COVID recession, U.S. trade deficits increased sharply in both 2020 and 2021, as shown in the figure below. This is because the United States was unable to produce the goods needed to respond to the pandemic and to meet increased domestic demand for consumer goods.

However, contrary to popular opinion, the growth in U.S. imports was not just caused by increased domestic goods consumption coming out of the 2020 COVID recession. Imports explained more than 60% of the growth in U.S. goods consumption in 2021, and U.S. goods imports increased faster (21.3%) than domestic goods consumption (17.8%).

Soaring U.S. goods trade deficits reached $1.1 trillion in 2021, 1997–2021

Source: EPI analysis of Census Bureau and the USITC trade data.

Growing trade deficits have hurt U.S. manufacturing output and employment during the recovery, contributing to the net loss of 226,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs since December 2019. Federal relief spending is leaking away from domestic producers and supporting job creation in other countries.

U.S. trade deficits are almost entirely explained (98.8%) by the deficit in manufactured products, as shown in the figure above, in part because the United States has become a net exporter of crude oil and refined petroleum products over the past two years. The U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods is explained by China’s soaring global trade surplus, which has increased 60% since 2019, and by imports from other countries with structural trade surpluses, including Japan, South Korea, and the European Union.

These trade surpluses are, in part, the result of these countries undertaking trade and industrial policies to boost manufacturing. If the United States fails to do the same, we’ll continue to lose ground. In addition, China and other surplus countries have maintained persistently undervalued currencies since the 1990s through financial manipulation and excess U.S. capital inflows, which help explain these trade imbalances.

To rebuild demand for domestically made manufactured goods, U.S. policymakers need to develop more effective Buy America and other trade and industrial policies, and offset unfair trade and currency policies. Rebalancing U.S. trade and capital flows can create millions of good jobs for U.S. manufacturing workers.

Robert E. Scott is a Senior Economist and the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research. 

To read the full commentary from the Economic Policy Institute, please click here. 

The post Bodog Poker|Welcome Bonus_for Black workers and appeared first on bodog.

Exceptional policy support prevented a global economic depression, even as the pandemic took a heavy toll on lives and livelihoods. The global reaction, as seen in major shifts in travel, consumption, and trade, also made the world a more economically imbalanced place as reflected in Bodog Poker Current Account Balances—a record of a country’s transactions with the rest of the world.

In our latest External Sector Report we found that the global reaction to the pandemic further widened global Bodog Poker Current Account Balances—the sum of absolute deficits and surpluses among all countries—from 2.8 percent of world GDP in 2019 to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2020. Those balances are set to widen further as the pandemic continues to rage in much of the world.

If not for the crisis, global Bodog Poker Current Account Balances would have continued bodog sportsbook review to decline. While external deficits and surpluses are not necessarily a cause for concern, excessive imbalances—larger than warranted by the economy’s fundamentals and appropriate economic policies—can have destabilizing effects on economies by fueling trade tensions and increasing the likelihood of disruptive asset price adjustments.

bodog poker review

The dramatic fluctuations in current account deficits and surpluses in 2020 were driven by four major pandemic-fueled trends:

• Travel declined: The pandemic led to a sharp decrease in tourism and travel. This had a significant negative impact on the account balances of countries that rely on tourism revenue, such as Spain, Thailand, Turkey, and even larger consequences for smaller tourism-dependent economies.
• Oil demand collapsed: The collapse in oil demand and energy prices was relatively short lived, with oil prices recovering in the second half of 2020. However, oil-exporting economies, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, saw Bodog Poker Current Account Balances decline sharply in 2020. Oil-importing countries saw corresponding increases to their oil trade balances.
• Medical products trade boomed: Demand surged by about 30 percent for medical supplies critical for fighting the pandemic, such as personal protective equipment, as well as the inputs and materials to make them, with implications for importers and exporters of these items.
• Household consumption shifted: As people were forced to stay home, households shifted their consumption away from services toward consumer goods. This happened most in advanced economies where there was an increase in the purchase of durable goods like electrical appliances used to accommodate teleworking and virtual learning.

All of these factors contributed to some countries seeing a wider current account deficit, meaning they bought more than they sold, or a larger current account surplus, meaning they sold more than they bought. Favorable global financial conditions, with the unprecedented monetary policy support from major central banks, made it easier for countries to finance wider current account deficits. In contrast, during past crises where financial conditions sharply tightened, running current account deficits was harder, pushing countries further into recession.

On top of these external factors, the pandemic led to massive government borrowing to finance health care and provide economic support to households and firms, creating large uneven effects on trade balances.

The outlook

Global Bodog Poker Current Account Balances are set to widen even further in 2021 but this trend is not expected to last. The latest IMF staff forecasts indicate that global current account balances will narrow in the coming years, as China’s surplus and the US’ deficit falls, reaching 2.5 percent of world GDP by 2026.

A reduction in balances could be delayed if large deficit economies like the US undertake additional fiscal expansions or there is a faster-than-expected fiscal adjustment in current account surplus countries, like Germany. A resurgence of the pandemic and a tightening of global financial conditions that disrupt the flow of capital to emerging markets and developing economies could also affect balances.

Despite the shock of the crisis and possibly due to its worldwide impact, excessive current account deficits and surpluses were broadly unchanged in 2020, representing about 1.2 percent of world GDP. Most of the drivers of excess external imbalances pre-date the pandemic and include fiscal imbalances as well as structural and competitiveness distortions.

Rebalancing the world economy

Ending the pandemic for everyone in the world is the only way to ensure a global economic recovery that prevents further divergence. This will require a global effort to help countries secure financing for vaccinations and maintain healthcare.

A synchronized global investment push or a synchronized health spending push to end the pandemic and support the recovery could have large effects on world growth without raising global balances.

Governments should step up efforts to resolve trade and technology tensions and modernize international taxation. A top priority should be the phasing out of tariff and non-tariff barriers, especially on medical products.

Countries with excess current account deficits should, where appropriate, seek to reduce budget deficits over the medium term and make competitiveness-raising reforms, including in education and innovation policies. In economies with excess current account surpluses and remaining fiscal space, policies should support the recovery and medium-term growth, including through greater public investment.

In the years to come, countries will need to simultaneously rebalance, while ensuring that the recovery is built on a solid and durable foundation.

To read the full commentary from IMF Blogs, please click here. 

The post bodog sportsbook review|Most Popular_further as the pandemic appeared first on bodog.

And critics of his trade policy argue Trump’s “magical thinking” created little chance for success.

New figures out Tuesday show the U.S. trade gap is on track to exceed $600 billion this year. That would be the highest since 2008, just before the global financial crisis.

The monthly deficit in U.S. goods trade with all other countries set a record high in August at more than $83 billion.

Trump has blamed the trade deficit on bad trade deals negotiated by his predecessors and unfair trade practices by other countries, but most economists disagree with that explanation.

“We have almost an $800 billion a year trade deficit with other nations,” Trump said in November 2017, after returning from his first trip to Asia as president. “Unacceptable. We are going to start whittling that down and as fast as possible.”

In those 2017 comments, Trump seemed to be referring to just the goods trade deficit while ignoring the surplus the U.S. enjoys in services trade. The combined goods and services deficit in 2017 was $514 billion, reflecting a nearly $800 billion goods deficit as well as a $286 billion services surplus. This year, the goods trade deficit is likely to exceed $850 billion.

The trade deficit measures the difference between what the U.S. imports and exports. The powerful U.S. economy sucks up goods from around the world, resulting in an annual trade deficit that has grown dramatically from a mere $6 billion in 1975.

A variety of factors contributed to Trump’s failure to eliminate the trade gap, which White House trade adviser Peter Navarro predicted in 2016 could be erased in one or two years.

Overall trade remains depressed compared to year-ago levels because of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the massive U.S. government stimulus payments to businesses and consumers have helped U.S. imports recover faster than U.S. exports. That explains why the monthly goods deficit has increased from the average level of $73.3 billion in 2019.

However, even without the pandemic, Trump’s practice of piling tariffs on China and selected other products like steel and aluminum was never going to turn around the deficit, most economists agree.

“Short-term fixes like tariffs don’t work,” said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor of economics at Syracuse University. “It’s magical thinking.”

The large U.S. trade deficit is fundamentally driven by larger economic factors — like the fact Americans spend more than they save and have to borrow from abroad to finance the difference, Lovely said.

Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017 contributed to that problem by running up the U.S. budget deficit. This year, Congress has approved more than $3 trillion in additional spending to help the U.S. economy recover from the coronavirus pandemic, tripling the budget deficit to $3.3 trillion and pulling the trade deficit along, she said.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, in a statement on Tuesday, defended the administration’s trade actions and attributed this year’s rise in the deficit to the strength of the U.S. recovery from the pandemic and investors buying gold as a hedge against the crisis.

“In spite of the pandemic, our goods deficit is down 2.4 percent year-to-date,” Lighthizer said. “The goods deficit would have decreased by at least 6 percent but for a large spike in gold imports reflecting risk-hedging strategies during the pandemic, not underlying economics.”

He said a 19-percent fall so far this year in the U.S. services surplus due largely to reduced tourism, travel and transport also helped widen the overall deficit. “As other countries recover and reopen, we expect both imports and exports to improve substantially,” Lighthizer said.

Still, although Trump failed to reduce the overall trade deficit, his tariffs helped change the composition of the deficit, which is important, said Michael Stumo, chief executive of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a Trump-friendly trade group.

Looking at trade in 2019, the last full year of data, the overall U.S. trade deficit fell by less than 1 percent from the previous year to $577 billion. However, the bilateral trade deficit with China fell by a much more impressive 17 percent to $345 billion as importers turned to other countries such as Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and members of the EU.

Imports also supplied a slightly smaller share of U.S. demand for manufactured goods in 2019 as measured by CPA’s “reshoring index” Bodog Poker which fell to 30.6 percent, from 31.2 percent in 2018.

That may seem like a tiny change, but the U.S. consumed about $7.1 trillion worth of manufactured goods in 2019. So even a small increase in the U.S. share of that market can help create thousands of new jobs, Stumo said.

But for Trump to fundamentally reduce the trade deficit, he needed to address misaligned currency rates because the strong dollar makes it hard for U.S. exporters to compete against other suppliers, Stumo said.

On that front, he ran into opposition from Wall Street money houses, who fear any aggressive moves to deal with currency because it hurts their bottom line, he said.

“A huge, excessively high part of our economy is finance and they’ll fight it,” Stumo said. “We’d like finance to be strong, but just not that big a part of our economy. We need a little bit more goods production.”

Trump’s “phase one” trade deal with China does contain a chapter which, for the first time in any trade agreement, contains enforceable rules against currency manipulation. While some trade experts worry that could open the door for renewed U.S. trade actions against China, others see the pact as more of a fig leaf.

“We would say one of the big failures of the Trump administration with respect to trade policy is the failure to address currency misalignment in any kind of meaningful way,” said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank aligned with union groups. “Putting a couple of sentences into the deal, but without a clear road map as to how it’s going to be instrumentalized, doesn’t really do very much.”

Lee also faults Trump for failing to pass a huge new infrastructure bill to create more jobs in the United States, as he promised during his 2016 campaign, and for approving a set of tax reforms “that took us in exactly the wrong direction by incentivizing and accelerating offshoring.”

Trump’s revised NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada does include strong protections for workers rights, which helped the pact win overwhelming approval in the Democratic-controlled House. But the fact that labor concerns were not addressed in the China agreement “just shows that the Trump administration is not driven by any principles in this area, but simply by political expediency,” Lee said.

The administration hails China’s agreement as part of the phase one trade deal to purchase $200 billion more of U.S. goods and services in 2020 and 2021, compared with the record it set in 2017.

But the data released on Tuesday shows that China is well behind on that goal. During the first eight months of this year, it had imported just $69.5 billion worth of U.S. farm and manufactured goods, compared to $80.2 billion in the same period in 2017.

U.S. farmers were hit so hard by Trump’s tariff war with China that his administration doled out more than $20 billion in emergency aid payments to help cushion the blow.

U.S. farm exports to China had reached as high as $25 billion annually a few years before Trump was elected. But they plummeted to $6.8 billion in fiscal 2019 after Beijing retaliated against Trump’s tariffs by raising its own duties on U.S. farm exports.

Now, even with the purchase commitments contained in the phase one trade deal, USDA forecasts farm exports to China in the current fiscal year that began on Oct. 1 at just $18.5 billion. That’s below the $21.8 billion during Trump’s first year in office.

The U.S. agricultural trade surplus, long a point of pride for farmers, has also dwindled under Trump. It is projected this fiscal year at just $4.5 billion, down from $21.1 billion in fiscal 2017.

Even some longtime China hawks fault Trump’s handling of trade.

The president’s decision to take Beijing on by himself, instead of working with allies such as the European Union and Japan, meant that the phase one trade deal failed to address many of the most serious concerns about China’s trade practices, said Mike Wessel, who has served on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, a watchdog panel created by Congress, since it began in the early 2000s.

“We certainly have to advance U.S. interests, but it’d be a lot better and more productive if we did it together,” Wessel said.

Trump also failed to implement domestic policies that would encourage production of manufactured goods in the United States, instead of other countries, Wessel argued.

“China has an integrated structure to achieve the goals laid out in its ‘Made in China 2025’ plan. It’s a holistic whole of government approach. We don’t have anything comparable,” Wessel said.

The post bodog sportsbook review|Most Popular_as president. “ appeared first on bodog.

In pandemic times, the US economy has shrunk faster than it did during the Great Recession, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled since this time in 2019. So why is the gap between what Americans buy and sell abroad larger than a year ago?

The usual pattern can be explained in a couple of ways: The US imports a lot of consumer goods, so when Americans are buying less in general, they buy less from abroad. Monetary policy is often loosened during recessions, which can lead to a more competitive currency and an increase in exports. Fewer luxury products are bought from abroad. American tourists stay home, while foreign tourists might see an opportunity to come spend in the US when their currency will go further.

Since the pandemic forced Americans and indeed people around the world to avoid indoor groups, the economic impact has played out in unusual ways. Compared to the experience during the financial crisis, US imports have rebounded much more quickly than exports.

bodog online casino

Economists have several explanations for this state of affairs. One common denominator is the role of the government’s stimulus efforts, particularly checks mailed to many American households and expanded unemployment benefits for workers who lost their jobs due the pandemic. These benefits were generous enough to boost incomes and lower poverty despite a massive leap in unemployment, and that means more purchases of consumer goods than might otherwise happen in a recession.

What else makes the pandemic recession unique? Service-focused businesses like bars, restaurants, concert halls, hotels, airlines, and sports stadiums have all closed, leaving those who can keep working, particularly white collar workers, with extra money to spend. Many are buying home goods, exercise machinery, televisions, computers, or video game consoles instead. In general, money shifted from services to goods is going to mean a rising share of imports.

“We’ve had this special combination of macro stimulus (fiscal and monetary) plus possibly (data still coming in on this) a shift in consumption patterns toward traded goods due to more at-home activity and people moving into new homes needing to be furnished. That spells more imports,” Kathryn Russ, an economist at the University of California, Davis told Quartz in an email. “If our shift toward imports has been more dramatic than in other countries, then that also spells a widening trade deficit.”

There are other unique factors: The rush to obtain chemicals and materials needed to perform coronavirus tests and develop and deliver vaccines shows up in the data above. So does another response to the government’s rescue efforts: Imports of gold have risen dramatically, likely in response to some investors (largely unfounded) fear of rising inflation due to low interest rates and high government spending.

What about exports?

On the other side of the trade balance equation, the US was already facing some headwinds because its leading exporter, Boeing, is still working to convince airlines and regulators that its flagship product, the 737 Max airliner, is safe. Combined with pandemic-driven travel restrictions, the US saw dropping exports of planes and their parts. The trade war with China also shows up here, with less exports of soybeans to a previous top customer.

Since the last recession, the US has also emerged as a major exporter of petroleum. But as coronavirus spread around the world, demand for oil has fallen commensurately, leaving the US exporting less of this money maker. Falling global demand also means other US exports, like cars and car parts, have suffered, too.

The unusual nature of the current recession also shows up in falling exports of artwork, jewelry, and diamonds—goods often purchased by foreign travelers on American shopping sprees that are going unsold with visits to the US banned by many governments.

What’s next?

The atypical trade data helps explain the current moment of uncertainty in the economy after the expiration of many economic support programs enacted by the US government. The biggest difference between the Great Recession and now is the magnitude of the government’s intervention.

Economic activity has begun to rebound but still remains well below pre-pandemic levels. And if the virus continues to spread in the US, more restrictions on activity are unavoidable, as is already happening in Europe.

You can see investors are worried about where this will lead, with the S&P 500 stock index on a downward trend over the last month. In Washington, Democrats in the House of Representatives have pushed for another major rescue package, while Republicans in the Senate and the Trump White House have focused on a smaller rescue more focused on bodog sportsbook review tax cuts, leaving working people—particularly those who are losing hours and jobs—to bear the human cost.

“The biggest question is whether the US will sustain the rescue for the poorest American families,” Russ says. “While trade is recovering much more swiftly than in the Great Recession, childhood food insecurity has been worse than in the Great Recession, with no end in sight. While some are in the throes of a real-estate boom, many others are struggling with eviction.”

Tim Fernholz covers space, the economy and geopolitics for Quartz. He is the author of “Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race.“
Dan Kopf is Quartz’s data editor. He is based in Oakland, California and writes about economics, music and statistics.

To view the post, please click here.

The post bodog online casino|Welcome Bonus_on a downward trend over appeared first on bodog.

To be more precise, the trade deficit is the amount by which the total value of purchases of U.S. consumers, businesses, and governments from foreign suppliers exceeds the total value of purchases of foreign consumers, businesses, and governments from U.S. suppliers.

The trade deficit gets a lot of negative attention. It’s got a bad reputation—probably because it’s called a “deficit.” Sounds like something that needs fixing. But the truth is that the trade deficit has a lot going for it. It’s just, well, misunderstood.

Over the years, my colleagues and I have written extensively about the real meaning of the trade deficit; that it is not a reflection of trade policy; that it is to be expected for a country whose government issues the world’s primary reserve currency; and that the dollars that go abroad to purchase imports find their way back into the U.S. economy in the form of investment in equities, real estate, factories, other structures, equipment, and corporate and government debt; and that the only portion of that capital inflow from foreigners that current and future taxpayers need to repay is the principal and interest on government debt (which implicates fiscally irresponsible government, not trade).

President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, White House adviser Peter Navarro, and others in the administration don’t seem to get this. They see trade a zero sum game, with exports as Team America’s points, imports as the foreign team’s points, and the trade account as the scoreboard.

The deficit on that scoreboard (the trade deficit) means that Team America is losing at trade and it’s losing because the foreign team—much like the Houston Astros—cheats. The misguided objective of trade policy for the past three years has been to minimize imports and maximize exports.

And the tools deployed in pursuit of these objectives—sweeping tariffs, withdrawal from a major trans‐​pacific trade agreement, wanton subversion of the international rule of trade law, and compelling partners into renegotiations of trade agreements under the barrel of a gun—have failed to eliminate (or even reduce) that trade deficit.

To view the full blog, click here.

The post bodog poker review|Most Popular_“deficit.” Sounds appeared first on bodog.

In fact, the one area where Trump has most clearly failed to keep his promise is central to his ideology and appeal: the trade deficit. Trump campaigned relentlessly on the notion that America’s economy was being ruined by large trade deficits. (The United States imports more goods than it exports.) He promised on the campaign trail in June 2016, “You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before.”

In reality, the trade deficit has risen substantially under Trump. It was $503 billion in 2016 and grew to $628 billion in 2018, a 25 percent spike. (It fell slightly in 2019 to $617 billion.) ​

When I interviewed one of Trump’s closest advisers bodog casino (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner on CNN this month, he told me that it was obvious Trump was right about trade deficits being bad. When I then inquired why the trade deficit had gone up under Trump, his response was, “That’s because our economy’s growing . . . America has been outpacing the world.” This is correct, and you can see it in the historical data. In the past 30 years, when the United States has grown robustly, its trade deficit has tended to rise. If you want to achieve a sharp decline in the trade deficit, it’s easy — just trigger a recession. The greatest drop in the U.S. trade deficit took place in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis.

Trade policy can get very wonky, so let me try to make this simple, building on a thought experiment by Roger L. Martin in the Harvard Business Review. Imagine a country that has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but still generates more than 20 percent of global gross domestic product. It buys far more goods than it sells, but it leads the world in the industries of the future — services and technology. It also has excellent laws protecting private investment and a strong, stable currency.

If you were living in another country, wouldn’t you want to invest your money there? This imaginary country, of course, is the United States. People might not buy as many American goods, but they buy lots of American services and invest their money in America.

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for the Atlantic.

The post bodog casino|Welcome Bonus_of Trump’s closest advisers appeared first on bodog.