FYI, here is an interesting excerpt from an article about Trump’s tariffs in yesterday’s The NYT:
"President Trump says he is outraged by the fact that the United States imports more goods than it sends to the rest of the world. What he rarely mentions, though, is that when it comes to services, the tables are turned.
Service sectors — which include the finance, travel, engineering and medical industries and more — make up the bulk of the American economy. Exports of these services brought more than $1 trillion into the United States last year.
But that dominance also gives other countries some clout in negotiations — including the ability to impose some pain on the U.S. economy as they look to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs on goods.
The European Union, for instance, could use tools designed to restrict services coming into the bloc as a cudgel.
The United States is the largest exporter of services in the world, and a large share of those services, from financial services to cloud computing, are delivered digitally. The country ran a trade surplus in services of nearly $300 billion last year.
Every time a European tourist stays at a U.S. hotel, for example, the money spent is counted in the services export basket. And every time someone in Canada or Japan or Mexico pays to listen to music or watch movies and television shows made in the United States, they are adding to America’s surplus in the services trade.
Many of the countries that the United States is targeting for tariffs run a services deficit with the United States, including Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The E.U. is now equipped with policy tools to extend the range of retaliation against U.S. tariffs to target imports of U.S. services,” Filippo Taddei, a managing director of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note about possible European responses.
Such measures could include tariffs, restrictions on trade in services and limits on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. That could affect American tech giants like Google. Several European diplomats said that use of the tool is a distinct possibility, should the trade war escalate."
Comments
elaborates on the NYT quote above
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the?r=tcpky&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Reminds me of the following quote - "How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of conservative politics in the twentieth century." - Aneurin Bevan