....when America comes to realise that they can't (or rather won't) want to kick the can down the road and to stop the 'rot', they're bringing forward their Judgment Day.
Peter Schiff:
There is a misconception in the Trump administration regarding the nature of the relationship the U.S. has with the rest of the world. According to Commerce Secretary @howardlutnick, the U.S. is the world's best customer. That without American consumers buying their stuff, other nations would have nothing to do with all the stuff they produce.
This overlooks the basic economic principle that supply is the limiting factor, not demand. Demand by definition is unlimited. There is no limit to what humans want. But the resources needed to satisfy those desires are scarce. Everything that is produced can be consumed. But you can't consume what has not been produced.
The 18th Century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say reduced this concept to a simple economic law that bears his name. "Supply creates its own demand.” But demand by itself is insufficient to create supply. If it was, there would be no poverty in the world. People are not poor because they are lacking in demand. They are poor because they lack the ability to create the supply to satisfy that demand.
The U.S. found a way to satisfy demand without creating supply. We fool the rest of the world into creating the supply for us. It reminds me of the way Tom Sawyer fooled the other kids in his neighborhood to whitewash his fence. When Mark Twain wrote that amusing passage he had no idea that his joke would one day become the basis for the entire global economy.
Comparative advantage leads nations to export what they produce efficiently to pay to import what other nations produce more efficiently than they do. So exports are merely a means to an end. But the U.S. economy doesn't produce enough goods to pay for our imports with exports. So we export dollars instead.
For now, the world is willing to accept our paper IOUs instead of payment in real consumer goods. Those dollars are then used to buy financial assets in the United States. This obligates the U.S. to pay interest, dividends, or rents to foreign creditors. Basically, America is selling off its cows to buy milk.
However, as trade deficits and financial payments continue to flood the world with dollars, the value of the dollar will eventually collapse, as America lacks the industrial capacity to redeem our paper IOUs in real consumer goods.
In the meantime, Americans enjoys an enhanced standard of living, as we ride on a foreign-powered gravy train. The rest of the world lives beneath its means to make it possible for Americans to live above ours.
So Lutnick has it backwards. America lives off the rest of the world, not the other way around. The world under-consumes and saves so Americans can over-consume and spend. Our entire consumer-based economy depends on this parasitic relationship continuing. But the longer it does, the worse it will be for Americans when it inevitably ends.
That's why Lutnick is right that the sooner it ends, the better off we will be in the long run.
But the transition from a borrow-and-spend to a save-and-produce economy will be far more painful for Americans than he realizes.
But the transition for the rest of the world will be much easier. The idea that consumption drives the economic train is not new. During World War II, many prominent economists of the day were worried that the end of the war would bring about another depression, as millions of soldiers and factory workers supplying the war effort would lose their jobs. But instead of a bust, the U.S. economy boomed, as factories went from producing weapons to consumer goods. A similar benefit awaits the rest of the world when it redirects its productive capacity to producing goods for themselves rather than for us.
Tariffs may be the wake-up call that foreign producers need to see the truth. America is not the world's best customer, but its worst. That's because we can't really afford to pay for what we "buy." So the world's producers have been lending us the money to buy the goods they make. It's a global vendor financing scheme. When it becomes obvious to our vendors that we can't pay, they'll cut us off themselves.
