There is, in no particular order, energy, inflation, and trade on the program today.

It will be more exciting than it sounds, I promise.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle.

It is Wednesday, today the 14th of January.

Good, as always, to have you along, everybody.

We begin today with global trade, not ours exactly, but very definitely related.

We learned this morning that China's trade surplus, that is the difference between what the world's second largest economy buys from overseas and what it sells to the rest of the world topped $1.2 trillion last year.

That is a 20% year on year increase. A lot, needless to say.

And it happened in the face of President Trump's tariffs. Chinese exports to pretty much every place in the world were up except here. And as Marketplace Mitchell Hartman reports, that has implications for China, and it has

implications for us. China's trade boom matters to U.S. businesses and consumers, says Jennifer

Lee, senior economist at Bank of Montreal. I think everyone should be always concerned about China.

Lee says China is so dominant in producing everything from

consumer goods to rare earth minerals that its costs of labor and production set the bar

against which other countries, including the U.S., have to compete. But now, with tariffs boosting

the cost of Chinese imports, consumers are facing more price inflation,

says Gary Huffbauer at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The things they will notice are all the stuff in Target or Walmart.

Furniture, clothing, electronics, a lot of that stuff comes from China.

The price are now somewhat higher than they would

otherwise be. Also, Huffbauer says U.S. factories are hurting because of the decline in trade with China.

A lot of imports from China are intermediate goods, which go into producing manufacturer goods.

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