Alternative stats

21 February 2017 By Peter Thal Larsen Follow @Peter_TL

Donald Trump’s economic team may tweak trade figures to make deficits look bigger, helping his push for tariffs. Though politicians have always cherry-picked numbers, fiddling with actual statistics threatens confidence. It also raises expectations Trump will struggle to meet.

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U.S. economic data in danger of taking Chinese turn

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U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is considering changing the way it calculates trade deficits to make the trade gap look bigger, the Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 19 citing people involved in the discussions.

The WSJ said the government was considering excluding from U.S. exports any goods first imported into the country, and then transferred to a third country like Canada or Mexico unchanged.

Those goods, known as re-exports, are currently counted in both import and export numbers. Excluding them from exports figures would increase the reported U.S. trade deficit.

Last year, the United States re-exported goods worth $224 billion, according to Census Bureau data. Excluding those goods would widen the U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world to $960 billion, from $735 billion.

Administration officials told the WSJ that the idea was part of an early discussion and that they were examining various options.

The Trump administration has used economic growth forecasts in its budget planning that are much more optimistic than those made by independent agencies and private forecasters, the WSJ reported on Feb. 17.

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