George Soros Quotes

Chile is a country that sells cheap and buys expensive, because we have to pay for manufactured goods from countries at much higher levels of development.

China are running trade deficits with the rest of the world. If you look at the U.S. trade deficit, it's close to $800 billion trade in goods. Half of that is with China, so it's a big part of the problem. And the problem with China, as opposed to, say, Canada, is that China cheats.

This is what Donald Trump understands. This is the trade deficit. We run a trade deficit of close to $800 billion a year.

We have to live with the rest of the world. And it's a mistake, in my view. Trade has generally developed in this country. We actually export 12 or 13 percent of our GDP. It was only 5 percent in 1970. But it benefits us. It benefits the rest of the world. It doesn't benefit the steelworker maybe in Ohio. And that's the problem that has to be addressed, because when you have something that's good for society, but terribly harmful for given individuals, we have got to make sure those individuals are taken care of.

All those trucks and barges that carry our goods to port are vital connections to the only force which can balance our trade deficit: export. We must keep doing what we do best if we are going to get America out of the red.

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

China saves too much, produces too much, sells too much to Americans and consumes too little.

After aircraft production, the entertainment industry is America's largest source of trade surplus.

The United States is the least protectionist country in the world but has the largest trade deficit, while other countries are highly protectionist and have huge trade surpluses. This cannot continue.

If trade deficits are good, why is China so pleased that they run a huge trade surplus? It's perfectly obvious that if China hadn't been such a huge net-exporter, it never would have grown at the rate that it did.

That's the kind of thinking that our country needs. When we have a country that's doing so badly, that's being ripped off by every single country in the world, it's the kind of thinking that our country needs, because everybody, we have a trade deficit with all of the countries that we do business with, of almost $800 billion a year.

We are trading away a little bit of our country all the time for this access consumption that we have over what we've produced. That is not good. I think it's terrible over time. But our country's productive grows enough so we actually can do that, and we'll still be better off. We just don't be as well off as if we hadn't done it.

We've been the foolish country for so long with this free trade, but it's not free trade because it's - you know, just doesn't work. I mean, it's not working. You look at the deficits we have.

The U. S. trade deficit with China shows that while we value the potential of their market, they value the reality of our market. It is in this area that we should use our leverage.

Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.

We're losing our companies; we're losing jobs; they devalue us out of business - China and these other countries.

I truly believe that America's greatness and billions and billions of dollars of our wealth flows away because China doesn't treat us fairly.

That means we get other countries to play by our rules. You add up all the countries that we have trade agreements with, we have a surplus with them. You add up the countries we do not have a trade agreement with, that's where a massive trade deficit comes from. So our goal is to get free trade agreements, and that means we get other countries to play and live by our rules so we can level the playing field.

With our trade deals we are always second. You can pick any country and they're eating our lunch and making us look bad and so we're going to change that.

You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.

A large country with such outstanding economic performance as Germany cannot forget that it owes some of its success to demand from other European countries.

Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country or, frankly, any other country. Never, ever again.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

In my view, [the trade deficit] will create political turmoil at some point...Pretty soon, I think there will be a big adjustment.

We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.