I have a couple of trade policy presentations next week, and doing some homework. One theme is that global value chains have magnified bilateral imbalances even when there's not much overall change 1/
US trade balance in goods, as % of GDP, is about where it was in 2000 2/ 
And in fact our overall deficit with East Asia hasn't changed much -- but it has been redistributed so that it's now mainly with China 3/
That's because of China's role as the Great Assembler; a lot of the deficit is really with Japan. Also, fun fact: > 1/2 of US deficit with Germany offset with surpluses v Belgium and Netherlands -- prob bc our exports to Germany go via Rotterdam and Antwerp 4/
Moral of the story: bilateral balances don't mean much, and in fact mean less than they used to. Actually, other moral is that I'm a huge nerd 5
