Soumaya Keynes
speaker
263 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Soumaya Keynes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And over the long run, that's really the most potentially damaging thing associated with trade.
So I think there are two questions in there.
So one is, what's the right level of the trade deficit, right?
And was Trump right to be so concerned about the trade deficit?
And then there's a second question about, do tariffs help?
So on that first question, I have a bit of a regret because I feel like the first Trump administration was spent
yelling at President Trump for being so silly for caring about bilateral trade deficits.
He was obsessed with the bilateral trade deficit with China.
Economists, pundits were just screaming, don't you realize that if you squash one bilateral trade deficit, it'll just pop up somewhere else?
If you import less from China relative to exports, all that's going to end up shifting to, say, Vietnam or Mexico, which is largely what happened.
We spent so much energy criticizing President Trump for obsessing over those bilateral trade deficits, justifiably, but we didn't spend enough time asking bigger questions and trying to move the public debate on about overall economic imbalances.
If you look at the US and their accounts with the rest of the world, there is a problem there.
They have a big current account deficit.
This can get really technical really fast, but their net international investment position, which is an indicator of their external wealth, that has deteriorated dramatically over the past couple of decades.
It's the biggest negative position of any country in the world.
It's extraordinary.
And so it is reasonable to think that that is a problem and to want to do something about it just for the basic reason that it could sow the seeds of a financial crisis.
But the next question is, okay, if you do think that's a challenge and many, many, the IMF thinks it's a concern, many, many people think it's a concern.
Are tariffs the way to fix it?
And there, the experience of Liberation Day suggests, not really.
Showing 101–120 of 263 · page 6 of 14
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