March 08, 2014
Washington politicians like to hyperventilate about the budget deficit. However changes in the budget deficit are overwhelmingly a response to economic conditions rather than the result of deliberate policy. In other words, politicians didn’t have much to do with the changes. Furthermore, since the budget is responding to economic changes, it is not giving us new information about the economy.
On the other hand the trade deficit is a direct measure of the amount of demand that is going overseas rather than being spent here. This represents income generated in the United States that is not creating demand in the United States. By definition, this lost demand must be made up by other borrowing, either by the public sector (i.e. budget deficits) or the private sector. Currently the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of around $480 billion (@ 3.0 percent of GDP), which means that the sum of net borrowing in the public and private sector must be equal to $480 billion.
The impact of the trade deficit in reducing demand swamps any plausible impact from changing consumption patterns due to debt or even the upward redistribution of income that we have seen over the last three years (a trend that has been furthered by the trade deficit). Given its enormous importance for the economy it is bizarre that the media largely ignore trade figures.
Yesterday the Commerce Department reported that the trade deficit was $39.1 billion in January, about $2 billion higher than the consensus forecast from economists. The figure for December was also revised up from $38.7 billion to $39.0 billion. If this was reported by the NYT it was not easy to find. This news was a small brief in the Washington Post business section.
Politicians tend not to like to talk about the trade deficit because the leadership of both parties supports the policies that have led to large trade deficits. But serious news outlets are not supposed to report only the news that the politicians want them to report. The trade deficit matters hugely to the economy and to ordinary workers, there is no excuse for not giving it a substantial amount of coverage.
Note: share of GDP added later — Convert correctly pointed out my failure to provide context.
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