For the last 15 months and counting, exports from the USA have been below the values of the equivalent month three years earlier. Not one year ago. Not two years ago. Three years ago! This is truly appalling.
This has not happened before in the seventy years since the USA has kept trade records. This has never happened in any other developed country.
That is according to an article published today in Independent Australia which has tracked trade outcomes for all developed economies.
Trump’s tariffs fiasco
The blue chart at the top shows the stark outcome of former US President Donald Trump’s monumentally stupid decisions to impose tariffs unilaterally on imports from trading partners.
The chart depicts changes in export values over the three years from the first quarter in 2018 to the first quarter 2021 for all major advanced economies.
The USA has had the world’s third worst collapse in exports – just ahead of Israel and Britain, each of which also had incompetent governments mismanage trade policies.
Decades to repair damage
Trump announced punitive tariffs on a range of imported goods in May 2018. Exports have now been below the May 2018 level in every single month since.
The Independent Australia analysis claims It may take years to get back to the trade position Trump inherited. It may take decades to recover the losses incurred over that period. The thousands of farmer suicides during Trump’s rural recession will, of course, never be restored.
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The article is available in full here for free:
independentaustralia.net/...
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“Alan Austin is a great Australian journalist and,
I think, a pirate. I steal Alan Austin’s findings all the time.”
~ Jordan Shanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtV-2X4BjQI
