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He’s right: they don’t work. Tariffs might work in a world in which trade imbalances are driven by differential production costs or manufacturing advantages. In a world in which trade imbalances are driven primarily by savings and income imbalances, however, all they...
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can do is divert trade, raise costs, and shift a country’s bilateral imbalances without changing its overall imbalances.

We must either engineer a new kind of trade agreement among countries that explicitly deals with these savings and income balances, or prevent...
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their transmission by limiting capital movement. We've experimented for decades with tariffs, quotas and purchase commitments – always keeping capital mobility sacrosanct – and have done almost nothing during all this time to change global trade imbalances.
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