I read this article in the NY Times just now on China’s $13B trade surplus… for the month of May. I’m frightened to even look up what the US trade deficit was for May 2006. I’m sure it was quite ugly.
After posting a record $100 billion trade surplus in 2005, much of it with the United States and Europe, China said today that its surplus had already reached nearly $47 billion in the first five months of this year, a period that is historically slower for exports than the second half of the year.
The government said exports in May rose 25 percent, to $73 billion, while imports rose 22 percent, to $60 billion.
The U.S. trade deficit for April was $63.4B. The full report is available here via the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S. numbers for May won’t be released until July 12th.
Those are some frightening numbers straight up and more so when you think about it for a minute. I’m no economist by any means, but it don’t take a fucking economist to know that those numbers spell S-H-I-T for us. The war in Iraq has cost us some $300+ Billion to date, just think of the things we could be doing with that.
There’s been talk for the past few months of the insane growth in China and all this pointing to the initial signs of inflation for China down the road a year or two. There’s also been talk of pressures from outside of China calling for allowing the Yuan to appreciate against other countries’ currencies in order to help level the global trading field.
I know that there are plenty of economically minded folk in the BooMunity, please share with us not so economically minded [alright, I admit it, I just want a freebie lesson!] ones as to what all this means in a more in-depth manner than me just saying that it spells S-H-I-T for us.