Capricious, adjective, given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior.

Also, the trade policy of the United States of America.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle. It is Wednesday, today the 9th of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

I don't... What? I mean, where do you start on a newsday like today? We started around here with Chad Bound. At least that was the plan anyway.

Chad's a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

And we had them lined up to talk about trade and tariffs and what the what.

And we're going to play that because it's a good interview.

But, well, you'll see.

First question to Chad was a pretty basic one.

Are trade deficits, contra to what the president believes, are they inherently bad?

Nope. It's essentially the United States is buying things. So other countries are willing to sell us stuff. And the match on the other side isn't necessarily that they just want to buy our goods.

They may want to invest in companies that are producing things in the United States.

Or they might want to buy stocks and bonds in the United States.

So running a trade deficit in general is not a terrible

thing for the U.S. economy. The subtext of what you said there is important. We take our

dollars and we send them overseas and overseas companies send us their stuff. But then they

also take those dollars and a lot of them come back into this

economy. That's exactly right. It's a it's a open loop kind of system. And, you know, it's it's worked

pretty well. Doesn't mean it always works and that there aren't, you know, some challenges sometimes

associated with trade.

But I think the ones that President Trump has identified the trade imbalance and bilateral trade imbalances in particular with just specific countries is probably not the biggest problem with the United States to be worrying about.

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