"Bilateral deficits are going to keep popping up everywhere," [Robert Staiger] said. "Trump is going to be playing Whac-a-Mole."
The overbearing cause of the trade deficit is the need to keep US Bucks in sufficient supply to sustain global growth; global deflation through the simple mechanism of restricted supply of specie (which, as you know if you've been reading these missives for a while, is the US Buck) will be a disaster for everyone. And, no, the loss of supply of goods from south of the Rio Grande and Asia won't mean that manufacturing capacity will pop out of the ground as toadstools after a heavy rain. FIRE has eaten the GDP.
Robert Lighthizer has been involved in international trade diplomacy long enough to remember this kind of go-it-alone trade strategy. He doesn't appear to have learned the lessons history has taught us since then.
Alas, Porter doesn't connect the dots through to the demand for the US Buck as support for international trade. Thanks to having won WWII, and rebuilding both Europe and Japan, we now have the responsibility, in perpetuity, for that trade.
[update]
for the record, here's a graph of gold stocks
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