November U.S. Trade Deficit: $64.2 Billion
Submitted by
CalculatedRisk on Wed, 01/11/2006 - 9:14pm (8 comments)
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I am interested in following the trade deficit with China.
This is what I posted on Roubini's blog.
My guess is that oil prices will start crowding out consumer goods
in the US trade deficit. This will cause a decline in imports from
China, and mark a new phase of BW2. It will be a sign (for China) to focus less
on exports to US and to focus more on consolidating its share of
international energy supplies.
vorpal, I'm hoping to have some time to dig through these numbers in the next few days. Its amusing the UK is worried about their current account deficit (about 2.5% of GDP) - that is nothing compared to the US deficit (6%+ of GDP).
Best Wishes.
Cool. You are good with the refi numbers. Those are probably important as well.
One question: I was comparing exhibit 9 with exhibit 11. They both give trade balance figures. 11 gives them in chain-weighted (real) dollars.
Why does petroleum (thru November) take up 29% of the budget deficit in exhibit 9, but only 18% in exhibit 11 ?
This is, at best, unhelpful, and I'm inclined to think, downright wrong.
Actually, I think I now understand the above numbers. I think BEA is simply wrong. The calculations were not what they were supposed to be.
They depreciated the value of oil by how much the price of oil inflated. And they depreciated the non-oil by the non-oil inflationary number. Nothing wrong with that, except they give the values in dollars rather than quantities.
In other words, these numbers give values for 'utility' market share (of our 'utility' imbalance) rather than dollar market share. But they are presented as dollar market share...therefore wrong.
Moreover, I'm not sure that 'utility' market share has any real use.
Does anybody follow me on this? If this is true, then the BEA is putting out garbage numbers and they should be embarrassed and corrected.
Maybe, I'm overlooking something significant. That's why I would appreciate it if some of you all would check this.
vorpal, I rarely look at the chained numbers - that does seem strange.
Best Wishes.
They explain the numbers at the Census bureau site, at least, how they arrive at them.
Not sure if that makes the numbers worth a damn.
The decrease in the petroleum deficit was primarily due to a drop in the price of crude oil
Was the slight decrease in China imports due to a drop in the price of those electronic widgets or just the cordless drills?
The cordless drill that WalMart imports in Oct is sold in Nov?, Dec? Jan?, but the oil that is imported in Oct is not so easily quantized, returnable, discountable or depreciable.
I want to say somethng about the complexities (Ok, it could be my thick-headedness.) of these macro reports. This one purports to tell us something about our Oct economy by looking at our trade receipts in that month. I would have thought that the trade numbers would reflect anticipated (by the Retailers) Xmas consumer activity--maybe that's Seasonally Adjusted out of sight?
OTOH, maybe the apparent decline in China imports was only a decline in prices--maybe that's Real USD'd out of sight?
Against that there does seem (maybe only for thick-headed me) to be a different (and possibly complex) treatment for oil:
The decrease in the petroleum deficit was primarily due to a drop in the price of crude oil