CFR senior fellow. Views are my own. Retweets are not endorsements. Writes on sovereign debt and capital flows.
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The roughly $400b Chinese current account surplus in the last 4qs isn't as extreme an outlier as $200b in the 4qs to q2 but it still puts China's current account surplus well below the rest of East Asia. &the goods data tells another story all together
And the fourth quarter isn't an outlier -- the runup in the US current account deficit in 2024 (please take note @IMFNews) was financed privately, official (official = foreign central bank and SWF) demand for US assets was modest!
That's real money. The net global current account (or trade imbalance, if you don't trust the current account numbers right now) is something like $1.5 trillion, so $400b is 1/4 of the total net financial flow that sustains trade imbalances. 2/ 
And since China has had a policy of limiting its Treasury holdings (and shifting fx reserves over to the SCBs and policy banks) since around 2010, China's share of the Treasury market has shrunk radically ...
Canada is the wrong target, as it is in fact a good market for US manufactures. The best in fact. And raising the price of industrial inputs (like Canada's low carbon aluminum) makes US downstream industry less competitive ...
I have been baning on about this for a while. That's because it is obvious in the data. Pharma imports were $112b before the TCJA. They are now $260b. 
Official demand has been extremely flat the last two years -- with Chinese sales offset by other countries purchases. China is adjusted for Euroclear -- and Chinese sales were stronger in 23 and early 24 than in recent months ...
Surging imports led the trade deficit (sign reversed) to pop off the page (the annualized run rate is something like $1.8 trillion ... )
As this chart shows, China has not yet reversed the fall in the consumption share of its economy that occurred after Zhu Rongji's reforms, & coincided with WTO entry. In my NYT piece, I argued that this is China's original sin: it created a structurally unbalanced economy
And a chart showing why tariffs on semiconductors (imports of around $60b) are no substitute for a "CHIPS act" -- imports of semiconductors are only 1/5th of imports of products that use semiconductors
Argentina's fiscal looks better than the IMF expected pre-Milei (though the non transferable USD bills held by the BCRA mask the true fiscal deficit/ true interest expense). The BoP tho looks bad -- the predictable result of an overvalued peso.
One thing about agricultural exports is that they are, well, seasonal. The biggest US ag export to China by far is soybeans, and the '24 harvest has already shipped out ...
Spot is at 7.29 -- weaker than the fix no doubt, but not yet at the edge of the band.
The bottom line here is simple -- the major US pharmaceutical companies collectively report earning over $50 billion globally and did not set aside anything (that's right anything) to cover their 2024 tax liability to the US federal government.
Imports of consumer goods for example surged (likely Chinese consumer goods back in January, but there might be even more in February given the risk of a tariff on Mexico ...)