Hello and welcome to more or less the program that looks at the numbers in the news and the world

around us. I'm Kate Lambel. Over the last few weeks the newspapers have been full of fears of

a global trade war. Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on imports from the likes of

China, Canada and Mexico unless supposedly unfair trade deals are ripped up and renegotiated.

Following the back and forth though, what's really noticeable is that when it comes to trade,

only one statistic really seems to matter to the American president.

The deficit is getting bigger and bigger. Our deficit with China, as you know,

$504 billion. When we're down by 30 billion, 40 billion, 60 billion, 100 billion.

When President Trump talks about trade, he only talks about trade deficits. It's the single metric

that he always goes back to when referring to a particular relationship. Mexico is an example.

We probably lose $130 billion a year. We lose a lot with Canada. People don't know it.

He said, no, no, you have a trade surplus. I said, no, we don't. I said, no, no, you have a trade

surplus. I say, Mr. Prime Minister, we do not. At the moment Trump mentions trade deficits so

often it could almost be a drinking game. But what does the figure really tell us? Chad Boin is

a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a host of the podcast

trade talks. In general, a trade deficit or surplus is just the difference between what a country

imports, what it buys from other countries, and what a country exports, what it sells to its

trading partners. That includes physical goods. But also services. So, financial services or

insurance or architecture or lots of things that aren't tangible necessarily, but are still

transactions in the global economy. So, if America buys more from a country than that country buys

from America, there's a trade deficit. And according to Trump, America has a trade deficit

with nearly every country. And it adds up. We have almost an $800 billion a year trade deficit

...