Yes, I’m just throwing some bs numbers around but IMHO things will have to make sense eventually when US can’t just print infinite dollars without crashing its value and Apple can’t just sell iPhones to the entire planet due to wars and trade barriers that are becoming the new normal.
The US is a huge whopping exception to this strong correlation between the balance of trade and currency strength. US exceptionalism is usually wrong, but in this case, the US dollar being the 'reserve currency' of the world is an incredible boon. The US has been able to sustain a huge trade deficit for decades without sky high inflation (you think it's bad now, it's nothing). In fact, foreign goods keep getting cheaper and the US dollar and services keep getting more valuable. A lot of this is because foreigners are willing to keep their savings invested in dollars (stocks & bonds, including the magnificent 7) rather than selling off their dollars to buy e.g. Chinese goods.
Also note that the tech companies make up a small portion of imports/exports.
But.. If trade restrictions (or security concerns) make it harder for the magnificent 7 to make money abroad, their profits will go down and there could also be an outflow of capital that puts inflationary pressure on the dollar, just because US stocks and bonds are less attractive - the trade deficit increasing would also contribute a bit, but it would be a much smaller effect.
An economy being propped up by foreign capital is not just a US phenomenon, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, Turkey 2000, Mexico 1994 - these crashes all were cause by sudden capital outflows. The proximate cause was a short term arbitrage trade, rather than those currencies being in extensive (structural) demand.
This concern is also why China doesn't let foreigners invest directly in Chinese companies. You can only buy weird derivative certificates that trade on a Hong Kong exchange and are subject to tight capital controls if need be.
Things like a domestic tax on imported goods/services (also called tariffs) are unlikely to lower the trade deficit unless there is already an industry domestically to absorb the demand.
You should look at where most of the compute of the world is physically located. You might have a shock.
"It's hard to argue that the yuan isn't undervalued. As the International Monetary Fund noted in its country report published in February, China's external position "is assessed to be stronger than the level implied by medium-term fundamentals and desirable policies." The yuan has nonetheless fallen in real terms due to China's low inflation.
Indeed, the renminbi has depreciated in real terms four years in a row, registering a cumulative 14% decline since 2021, according to IMF economists. They estimate China's real effective exchange rate could potentially be up to 20% undervalued.
China watchers Brad Setser and Mark Sobel, both former U.S. Treasury officials, go further and say the yuan is probably undervalued by as much as 30%. Setser has long argued that China's official balance of payments data understates the country's real surplus and that customs data is the more accurate barometer. By that measure, the trade surplus would be a percentage point of GDP wider."
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/chinas-yuan-is-underv...