, Columnist
China Can’t Cut Its Trade Gap by $200 Billion
There’s no way to make the math add up here.
An unlikely number in the unspecified future is still better than a trade war.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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The great thing about large numbers is they can get so huge that you can bamboozle people by chucking them around.
That’s the best way to view Beijing’s reported offer to reduce its trade surplus with the U.S. by $200 billion (the country's foreign ministry cast doubt Friday on whether such a proposal had been made). In the context of economies with a combined gross domestic product in the region of $30 trillion, it looks like a rounding error. The trouble comes when you try to work out where the reduction will come from.