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Editorial from Bloomberg (Bloomberg View has some great content these days) arguing that the main problem issue with China isn't trade of physical goods, but of capital.
- As counterintuitive as it may seem, if Trump wants to address the U.S. trade deficit with China, he must focus on the capital account, not the trade account. Instead of imposing tariffs, he should either implement policies that absorb foreign savings more productively into the U.S., say by exploiting historically low interest rates and investing in much-needed infrastructure whose economic benefits are too diffuse to be captured by the private sector. Or his administration should change the way savings imbalances are transmitted into the U.S., for example by taxing capital flows, which the U.S. was doing as recently as the 1960s.