Comments by "Nigel Johnson" (@nigeljohnson9820) on "US-China trade tensions escalate" video.

  1. The US running a massive trade deficit and can no longer afford to buy all its consumables from China. Tariffs are a crude way to stop the US economy spiralling into more debt. The application of tariffs alone will not solve the problem, US manufactures must take advantage of the higher prices of Chinese products to increase production of their own. The world is heading for a a new protectionist era simply because the the flow of money has become so mono directional. Many western countries have become decadent nations of consumers, producing very little of their needs. A situation that cannot be sustained indefinitely. What did the producer nations expect would happen? Where did they think the consumer nations would obtain more money? It is difficult not to notice the similarity to the relationship between a drug dealer and the drug addict. The producers manufacture lots of shiny junk consumables which they push onto nations who exist only to import this rubbish, having lost the ability to support themselves. Looked at this way, the unhealthy nature of world trade, as it exists today, is obvious.
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  2. This does not explain the trade deficit. The US is simply importing more than it exports. The UK has a similar problem. In the case of the UK, it allowed too many of its industries to be either taken into foreign ownership or to die as a result of cheap foreign imports. It effectively delegated the manufacture of the products it uses to overseas suppliers in the ridiculous belief that the economy could survive by providing services alone, mainly in the financial sector. This produced a predominately low wage, indebted economy, with a very few individuals "earning" huge amounts of money in the financial sector. The result is a very divided society of many poor and a few obscenely rich. Unfortunately for the government, the majority on low wages and in debt also vote. They expressed their disapproval by voting for a rebalancing of the economy away from financial services and back towards production that once provided well paying jobs. Globalisation was the main cause of the problem, however the EU set rules and directives that were politically motivated and designed to create an interdependence between member states to bind them together. In the UK's case, this favoured a huge trade deficit between it and the UK and enabled migrants to take up the low wage low skilled jobs on offer in the UK internal service sector, hence BREXIT. It is worth note that internal services industries do little for the UK economy, apart from suck in imported consumer products to be sold on the internal market. This goes a long way to explain the UK's poor productivity figures per worker man hour. Essentially it is due to a majority of people on low wages, working very hard to produce not much of any value to the rest of the world. For years the UK has been involved in a fire sale of UK assets and utilities to pay its debts. It has padded its GDP figures with construction. Again this sucks in raw material imports, but produces very little of value to the rest of the world. I suspect that the UK's problems are very similar to those of the US.
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