Shrinking Trade Deficit With Japan a Focus of Trump's Trip
The U.S. trade balance continued to be a focus for President Donald Trump during his trip to Japan, as Trump during a Nov. 6 press conference said the U.S. seeks “equal and reliable” access for exports to Japan, “in order to eliminate our chronic trade imbalances and deficits with Japan.” The U.S. had a $4.8 billion goods trade deficit with Japan in September, the most recent month for which Census Bureau trade data is available. “We're working on that -- something we've all been working on very hard from the very beginning of our meetings,” Trump said. During the press conference in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his country and the U.S. intend to create a “fair and effective” economic order in the Pacific region, and touted Japanese investment in the U.S. as a contributor to recent U.S. job growth.
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Trump pledged to take “very, very strong action” against countries engaging in unfair trade practices with the U.S. “It's already started, but most of the legal foundation has now been done,” he said. “And you're going to see a very big difference, and it's going to happen very soon.”
Trump also targeted China in the press conference, saying the U.S. has had “a very unfair trade situation” with the country, with a “massive” trade deficit ranging from $350 billion to $504 billion a year, “and that doesn’t include intellectual property,” Trump said. He added that he likes the term, “reciprocal,” to describe his trade approach. “When you explain to somebody that you're going to charge tariffs in order to equalize, or you're going to do other things -- some people that don't get it, they don't like to hear that,” he said. “But when you say it's going to be reciprocal -- that we're going to charge the same as they're charging us -- the people that don't want a five percent or a ten percent tariff say, ‘Oh, reciprocal is fair,’ and that could be 100 percent. So it's much more … understandable when you talk about reciprocal.”