Capital Economy, Business and Finance
A good number to make sense of yesterday’s friendly encounter at the White House between its current resident and Keir Starmer is 11.9 – the value in billions of dollars of the US trade surplus in goods and services with the UK in 2024.
The UK buys more from the US than vice versa, which is why Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was able to say last month at Davos that the UK was “not part of the problem” of US trade deficits that Trump is so keen to solve; and why he was surprisingly quick yesterday to say the US and UK could agree a deal to exempt Britain from the 25 per cent tariffs Trump plans to impose on imports from the EU. The US trade deficit with the EU last year was $235 billion.
With China it was $295 billion. In the new age, scale costs. Not that a US-UK deal is a sure thing.
There is no sign the US would give up its requirement that the UK accept exports of chlorinated chicken, nor that Labour backbenchers would accept it.
