Tag Archives: international trade

by Joseph Joyce When Safe Assets Are No Longer Safe The U.S. has long benefitted from its ability to issue “safe assets” to the rest of the world. These usually take the form of U.S. Treasury bonds, although there was a period before the 2008-09 global financial crisis when mortgage-backed securities with Triple A ratings were also used for this purpose. The inflow of foreign savings has offset the persistent current account deficits, and put...

RJS, MarketPlace 666, US Trade Deficit Rose 1.8% in December and up 27% in 2021 Our trade deficit rose 1.8% in December as the value of both our exports and our imports increased, but our imports increased by more….the Census report on our international trade in goods and services for December indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit increased by $1.8 billion to $80.7 billion in December, from a revised November...

Reporting about MMT that is actually accurate. Winning! Yahoo FinanceMMT Has a Big Hurdle to Overcome to Succeed in EuropeCarolynn Look, Bloomberg

This discussion has foundered on the rocks of semantics. The assertion is that imports are a real benefit and exports are a real cost. This is means that real resources are being transferred from domestic use in the case of exports, which is a real cost domestically, and real resources are being received in the case of imports, which is a real benefit domestically.Countries trade with each other either to obtain goods less expensively than they can be produced domestically, or to obtain...

Teaching a course on international economics (trade and finance) for international relations students. More on that later. Just wanted to post the exports to GDP ratio for the world. This is to give students a sense of the increase in trade in the last few decades, and also the relative stagnation since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Note that while exports are about US$ 23 trillion in a year, the daily turnover in the foreign exchange market is about US$ 5 trillion, according to the...

This post raises a question. Supposedly, the classical concept of prices of production with non-uniform rates of profits can be recast as a theory of foreign trade. I do not see how wages can properly be treated in such recasting. D'Agata (2018) and Zambelli (2018) are two recent papers that argue prices of production can be formulated with non-uniform rates of profits. They argue that this introduces a certain indeterminateness into prices, as in some of my examples of foreign trade....

Figure 1: Intercepts of Production Possibilities Frontiers for England1.0 Introduction In this example, gains and losses from trade vary with international prices. Given rates of profits are compatible with an interval of relative international prices for linen and corn, when trade exists only in consumer goods. I explore whether, when trade exists in capital and consumer goods, more than one pattern of specialization among countries is possible, depending on relative international...

Figure 1: Production Possibility Frontiers1.0 Introduction Suppose foreign trade is possible in consumption goods, but not in capital goods. In this example, whether or not England achieves gains from trade depends on relative international prices. If foreign trade were possible in both consumption and capital goods, both England and Portugal would obtain gains from trade. The numeric example in this post is a modification of one in a previous post. As I understand it, most students of...

Matthew Klein writes, in Barron's, about "Tarrifs and the Minimum Wage Are More Alike Than You Think". I disagree with some of the stuff in the middle about efficiency and reject the dualistic notion that government intervention is a meaningful concept. But this article otherwise parallels some of my arguments here. Josh Mason has made available his piece in Jacobin about the state of economics after the global financial catastrophe. The Review of Political Economy has made available...

Figure 1: Production Possibility Frontiers1.0 Introduction This post presents a numeric example of foreign trade in a model of the production of commodities by means of commodities. This is a modification of the model here, which considers a flow-input, point output technology. As usual, I show neoclassical economics is mistaken. Frictions, increasing returns, information asymmetries, principal agent problems, and so on do not need to be introduced to explain why the outcomes of free...