Here’s a statistic that tells you much of what you need to know about the US trade debate — only 1 per cent of US companies export. It’s a figure that I uncovered recently in a McKinsey Global Institute report on the state of US manufacturing, which confirmed much of what my own reporting has informed me about US trade problems.
They begin at home, not abroad. That is not a line you will hear over the next few days, as negotiators meet in Mexico for the latest round of North American Free Trade Agreement talks.
The Trump administration is likely to point fingers and threaten again to pull out of the whole agreement. But if the White House wants to fix trade, it would do better to look at three crucial mistakes that have been made at home — and then compare them with opposite strategies in China, the world’s biggest manufacturing country.