On Thursday, President Donald Trump is holding a “listening session” with 24 manufacturing CEOs.
The president described “unbelievably bad” trade deals the US had with other nations and added that “everything’s a deficit.”
“The deals we have with other countries are unbelievably bad,” he said. “We don’t have any good deals. In fact, I’m trying to find a country where we actually have a surplus of trade as opposed to … Everything’s a deficit.
“With China we have a close to a $500 billion trade deficit, so we have to do something. I spoke to the president, I spoke to many people – we’re going to work on that very, very hard. And we’re going to do things that are the proper things to do. But I actually said to my people, ‘Find a country where we actually do well.’ So far we haven’t found that country. It’s just losses with everybody. And we’re going to turn that around.”
Contrary to that characterization, however, the US does have trade surpluses with numerous nations.
Using data from the US Census, Business Insider put together a chart of the US' top 15 trade surpluses year-to-date for December in billions of dollars. The data are for goods only (meaning services are excluded).