International Trade and Finance Speech
Macroeconomics and Foreign Trade
Our economy is impacted in a global sense by a variety of factors. International trade and foreign exchange rates are just a couple of those factors that influence it significantly.
There can be severe consequences when the amount a country spends abroad outweighs the amount it takes in—that is, when it imports more from another country than it exports (Ghosh, 2012). Take, for example, the trade imbalance between China and the United States. Between the ten year span of 2001 and 2011, the trade deficit with China accounted for the elimination of more than 2.7 million U.S. jobs. Over 2.1 million of these were in manufacturing, which accounted for more than half of the total manufacturing jobs lost during that time period (Scott, 2012). This speaks volumes as to how significant and damaging to U.S. businesses and consumers a surplus of imports by a foreign country can be.
International trade impacts gross domestic product (GDP), domestic markets, and university students, as well. GDP is the way economists calculate how much our economy is producing in goods and services (McTeer, 2008). It, and our economy, generally move in the same direction. Exports of goods and services generate income at home, so they are part of the GDP, while imports of goods and services generate income somewhere else, so they are subtracted in order to provide a clearer picture of how well the economy is actually doing. Higher exports plus lower imports generally equals a thriving economy. When imports outweigh the exports, international trade hurts the domestic market, marking one more contribution to a recession (McTeer, 2008). This in turn impacts university students who enter the job market seeking a paying position that isn’t available…either because it has been contracted out to an international company who can find low-wage help, or because companies...