The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services shrank to $29.4 billion in October, down from $48.1 billion the prior month as the Trump administration’s tariffs continued to weigh on trade, data from the Commerce Department showed on Thursday.
The recent rise in exports and drop in the U.S. trade deficit also have been driven in part by trade in gold. Investors have been buying and selling gold in part to offset uncertainty related to the tariffs this year.
U.S. gold exports surged more than 60 percent from September to $17 billion in October. For the year through October, gold exports have more than doubled from the previous year.
The data also shows evidence of certain groups hurt by trade wars. Soybean exports are down $3.3 billion in the year through October, as China curtailed its purchases of U.S. beans and bought from South America instead. U.S. exports of civilian aircraft, computers, soybeans and pharmaceutical goods all fell on a monthly basis in October.
Tariffs could undergo more changes in the weeks to come. The Supreme Court is set to rule soon on the legality of many of the tariffs that Mr. Trump issued using a 1970s emergency law. But Trump officials have said that if those tariffs were struck down, they would use other authorities to impose new duties.
The figure was the lowest monthly trade deficit recorded since June 2009. But because of a surge in imports earlier this year, the overall trade deficit from January to October was still up 7.7 percent from the previous year.
Imports in October fell 3.2 percent to $331.4 billion from the previous month, while exports rose 2.6 percent to $302 billion. Because exports grew more than imports, the U.S. trade deficit shrank, in line with President Trump’s goals.
Duckbilling2 on
forgive me if I’m mistaken, but if we import less because of heavy tariffs, that would make the trade deficit go down, no?
also props to NYT, very disrespectful to refer to him at Mr T instead of president t, love to see it.
Putrefied_Goblin on
And yet we have a larger annual deficit than ever before. Annual deficits are projected at around $2 trillion through 2030, pushing the national debt to ~ $50 trillion by the end of the decade. The interest on this debt consumes more revenue than national defense or Medicare, and is increasing rapidly (they’ve more than doubled since 2022). We will be more over-leveraged than Greece when it went bankrupt.
The biggest factor contributing to this increase and these dire projections is Trump and the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which is destroying the future for millions of Americans.
Not only that, Social Security is at a fiscal cliff, and Trump and the GOP have sped up the timeline of when we go over that fiscal cliff to 2030. If we don’t fix social security before then, it will become a crisis, and they’ll need to borrow ludicrous amounts of money to fix it if we wait until it hits, pushing the country into an even worse debt crisis.
I want to know: what is the plan here? Because from where I’m sitting, it’s pretty bleak.
CubsThisYear on
It would be funny to see how people react to this if you phrase it as: “Foreign investment in the US falls to lowest level since 2009, latest data show”
Spicy__Urine on
Why do we care about trade deficit instead of federal debt, employment and CPI?
if we just tanked the US dollar we could bring the trade deficit to a surplus
5 Comments
The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services shrank to $29.4 billion in October, down from $48.1 billion the prior month as the Trump administration’s tariffs continued to weigh on trade, data from the Commerce Department showed on Thursday.
The recent rise in exports and drop in the U.S. trade deficit also have been driven in part by trade in gold. Investors have been buying and selling gold in part to offset uncertainty related to the tariffs this year.
U.S. gold exports surged more than 60 percent from September to $17 billion in October. For the year through October, gold exports have more than doubled from the previous year.
The data also shows evidence of certain groups hurt by trade wars. Soybean exports are down $3.3 billion in the year through October, as China curtailed its purchases of U.S. beans and bought from South America instead. U.S. exports of civilian aircraft, computers, soybeans and pharmaceutical goods all fell on a monthly basis in October.
Tariffs could undergo more changes in the weeks to come. The Supreme Court is set to rule soon on the legality of many of the tariffs that Mr. Trump issued using a 1970s emergency law. But Trump officials have said that if those tariffs were struck down, they would use other authorities to impose new duties.
The figure was the lowest monthly trade deficit recorded since June 2009. But because of a surge in imports earlier this year, the overall trade deficit from January to October was still up 7.7 percent from the previous year.
Imports in October fell 3.2 percent to $331.4 billion from the previous month, while exports rose 2.6 percent to $302 billion. Because exports grew more than imports, the U.S. trade deficit shrank, in line with President Trump’s goals.
forgive me if I’m mistaken, but if we import less because of heavy tariffs, that would make the trade deficit go down, no?
also props to NYT, very disrespectful to refer to him at Mr T instead of president t, love to see it.
And yet we have a larger annual deficit than ever before. Annual deficits are projected at around $2 trillion through 2030, pushing the national debt to ~ $50 trillion by the end of the decade. The interest on this debt consumes more revenue than national defense or Medicare, and is increasing rapidly (they’ve more than doubled since 2022). We will be more over-leveraged than Greece when it went bankrupt.
The biggest factor contributing to this increase and these dire projections is Trump and the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which is destroying the future for millions of Americans.
Not only that, Social Security is at a fiscal cliff, and Trump and the GOP have sped up the timeline of when we go over that fiscal cliff to 2030. If we don’t fix social security before then, it will become a crisis, and they’ll need to borrow ludicrous amounts of money to fix it if we wait until it hits, pushing the country into an even worse debt crisis.
I want to know: what is the plan here? Because from where I’m sitting, it’s pretty bleak.
It would be funny to see how people react to this if you phrase it as: “Foreign investment in the US falls to lowest level since 2009, latest data show”
Why do we care about trade deficit instead of federal debt, employment and CPI?
if we just tanked the US dollar we could bring the trade deficit to a surplus