… is from David Stockman’s March 28th, 2025, essay at Doug Casey’s International Man, “David Stockman on the Fallacy of Reciprocal Tariffs“:
It should be obvious by now that the Donald’s north star is “winning” and nothing else, and that he keeps score by whatever metric is handy. On trade, the scorecard is simply the bilateral merchandise trade balance of whichever country comes to mind at any given moment, and, crucially, whether the balance figure has a plus or minus sign in front of it.
That’s been the sum and substance of Trump’s trade philosophy ever since he started opinionating about the issue in the national media in the 1980s. Yet even though “winning” has its virtues in sports, tiddlywinks and many other aspects of life, the bilateral trade balance with each of the 193 countries which buy or sell goods of some type or another in the USA is about the closest thing to meaningless statistical noise as you can find.
