Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
And still the sum of all foreign trade must be zero, by the magic of double-entry bookkeeping: The exports of one state are the imports of another state. Sum up over the whole planet, and you have zero (so long as the rest of the galaxy does not pay us for the space probes we send them).

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Tue Mar 12th, 2013 at 02:38:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Trade is the flow of goods and services thus we need to look at Cash Statements rather than Balance Sheets.  History shows there will always be a larger flow of cash from resource to resource-user regions.  (Tho' I concede the current situation increases that flow.)  Mostly, IMO, from the fact there are many more potential and actual resource regions producing, e.g., wheat, than resource-user regions producing, e.g., iPods.  Also resource regions tend to be over-populated with respect to the per capita current market value of their goods in international trade.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
by ATinNM on Tue Mar 12th, 2013 at 03:13:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Whichever way you look at it, at the macro level it has to net to zero. That's really not controversial, except to German politicians it would seem.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
by Cyrille (cyrillev domain yahoo.fr) on Tue Mar 12th, 2013 at 03:52:07 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Surely you mean "fine us for parking the space junk we send them"?

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Wed Mar 13th, 2013 at 08:51:33 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series