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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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And why does this require price effects, demand elasticity, and asterisks in the formula?

I don't think it does. The substack you linked posited that trump's team are smooth-brains because they canceled out those potential elasticity terms, and are literally just setting tariffs based on the pure trade deficit.

Why must it be currency devaluation, rather than comparative advantage?

Well the currency saving aspect is what makes it not really a truly free floating exchange rate (whether their intentions are to manipulate or not). It can be a bit messier in the real world, but the pure logical premise of a floating exchange rate is that if one side is exporting more than the other, then their currency is going to appreciate (more buy-pressure on their currency in the foreign exchange market and more sell-pressure on the net-importing country's currency). And eventually that prices their exports out of competitiveness, and/or makes the import-country's exports such a value that they start to out-compete, until the imbalance disappears.

Just googling for a basic source, here's an old paper from 1982 that explains the logic & evidence pretty well:

The great advantage of floating exchange rates is that the exchange rate adjusts to equilibrate a country's balance of payments. Domestic economic policy can be used to promote full employment or to maintain stable prices.

[...]

An appreciation of the U.S. dollar puts U.S. exporters at a disadvantage in world markets and forces domestic producers to compete with cheaper imports. In 1971, for the first time since 1873, the United States had a merchandise-trade deficit. Since 1971, the merchandise-trade balance has been in surplus in only 2 years. Despite the large recent deficits, the U.S. current-account balance has tended to fluctuate around zero, because of the strong performance of the services account.

[...]

Under fixed exchange rates, reserve assets and government bonds are used to finance balance-of-payments deficits. In the case of a deficit, such financing can go on only as long as the reserve assets last or as long as foreign countries are willing to accept the IOU's of the deficit country. In the case of a surplus, such financing can go on as long as the surplus nation is willing to accumulate reserve assets and claims on foreign countries.

I would think it to be impossible to run sustained trade surpluses against another country, without simultaneously saving in their foreign currency. But I'd be interested if I'm wrong in that.

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