Terms of Trade: Australia Shows Flaws in Trump’s Surplus Love

Australia has a record trade surplus that, on the surface, Donald Trump would admire.

Photographer: Ian Waldie/

The U.S. president likes it when exports outpace imports and uses trade balances to score the world’s winners and losers. But as Australia’s export cup runneth well over its imports, the country’s economy is sputtering toward the weakest fiscal-year expansion since a 1991 recession.

The lesson from Down Under: The link Trump likes to make between a nation’s trade balance and its economic strength is tenuous at best.

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