If things start to go really badly in Iraq, and we have a long conflict and have to destroy a lot of infrastructure, that would be very dollar negative because we will get stuck holding a lot of the tab for that, at a time when we have budget deficits going out as far as the eye can see. |
Imports are about twice as large as exports, so just to stabilize the deficit, exports have to grow twice as fast. That's a pretty tall order. Then you throw oil on top of it. |
In general, a rising rate environment slows down growth, so most companies are not going to go as good as when rates are low. |
It shows the labor market is continuing to stabilize. |
It's not just China, it's not just oil. We spend more than we produce, end of story. |
It's very easy to get the trade gap to narrow, have a recession in the United States to cut spending here. But I don't think anyone wants that to happen. |
maybe it's 25 or 30 percent. |
Most people expect that the Fed will hike short-term rates more than the 10-year (yield) will go up this year. |
My expectation was the trade deficit would increase anyway into the low 60 (billion dollar a month) range. A $70 billion (monthly trade gap) sounds like a stretch, but we could be looking at the mid to high 60s now. |
Obviously they're getting a lot of flak from Congress and the Europeans as well. It was going to happen at some point anyway. It probably happened sooner than it would have if Congress and the administration hadn't said anything, |
Obviously, this quarterly swing is a one-off event. |
Once interest rate differentials begin to narrow, U.S. securities will lose some of their luster to foreign investors. |
People are starting to hedge bets. Obviously it's an uncertain time, |
People tend to look at core to get a look at overall strength and weakness of the economy, |
Sooner or later, foreigners will stop financing the deficit. But at this point they show no signs of slowing down. If there were trade barriers that caused Americans to buy significantly less imports, production here would go up a little, but the thing that would take the brunt of the reduction is that our spending would go down as prices went up. We would have less of everything. |