It might repeating misinterpretations or wholesale making shit up [1].
For any reasonable value of infinity.
This really puts things on a level playing field overnight, like nobody else would ever do.
Not regarding the balance of international trade or anything like US manufacturing, but math itself, especially financial math.
Now the best anybody can do is no better than the napkin quality math often done by a wild guesser who finagled themselves into a position where somebody would act on the figures, regardless of their certain wild inaccuracy.
All of a sudden everybody's more inaccurate in economics than they have ever been, it was just so unfair before :\
Of course these trade numbers aren't sports game scores and just "make this different" ... anyone with a clue knows that the end results economical could be very unpredictable and potentially very much not desirable.
It's striking that the administration explanation for all this is, to just not explain how they did anything.
They may have asked how to correct a trade imbalance but completely changed the characterization of the calculation from “trade imbalance” to “tariffs and currency manipulation”.
With any tool unless you understand how it works there is a danger you can’t accurately communicate what is happening. Or, for malicious users, it gives you an easy way to come up with a method to mislead and attain nefarious goals.
I have no idea how you can hold that view after seeing the hurricane forecast he sharpied. The man is legitimately a dullard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alaba...
Example - the climate. Everything in the US government was bleached from the words "climate change", but he is bent on occupying Canada and Greenland, both places which will be much more profitable when the ice melts. People can continue shouting from the rooftops that there is a climate change and he denies it. While they are busy doing that, he positions himself to profit from the incoming disasters. All the better if he can speed them up by selling more petrol.
Example 2 - government cuts. Will they make the government more effective - no. Will they make his cronies richer - yes, while making other people poor and easier to exploit. Is that a smart plan - no, but he is not the one paying the price, so it is fine.
Example 3 - tariffs. Ask yourself not who loses from them, but who wins when the dust settles and the new trade agreements are signed. And I can bet you that no matter how many american households suffer from stackflation or whatever, the household of Trump will not be one of them and they will get out even richer out of that.
There's many of us outside the US who think the same.
He is a blatant liar though, no doubt. That doesn't really contradict being an idiot.
Why not both?
For sure this will happen but there is a reason. The EU turned a blind eye on a lot of dark patterns used by the biggest players (such as lenient approach to scams that are omnipresent on Facebook, Instagram, Google platforms) and whatever these companies did they knew they might get a slap on the wrist maximum. Now that good relations are over, why would the EU tolerate this shit?
- Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements)
- Currency manipulation (eg. RMB)
- Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits).
It's "trade deficit / imports" without any care to why those numbers exist on a case-by-case basis.
This wasn't a thought out solution that took into account the vast multivariate things that happen in the real world, including those you mentioned.
They also used CCTLDs instead of countries which is how we ended up with:
* a tiny Australian island got much higher tariffs than Australia * tariffs on an uninhabited island * an island that is only inhabited by a joint US/UK military base getting tariffs