Monday, June 18, 2018
In a rather interesting exchange of tweets before the G7 summit in Canada, U.S. President Donald Trump clashed with both French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over trade policies.
President Trump threatened the two leaders with higher tariffs if they don't ease up on what he considers unfair trade policies. But as the following graph shows, neither Canada nor France is a particularly big offender when it comes to the United States' trade imbalance.
The trade deficit with the G7 countries in 2017 was just a quarter of the total (China accounted for 47%), and Canada and France were the smallest of the G7 deficits. Perhaps President Trump would have been more productive targeting Japan and Germany, since together the deficit with them is more than 4 times the combined deficits with Canada and France.
