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Economics
Balance of Trade
The difference between the value of goods a country exports and the value of goods it imports.
A trade surplus means a country sells more to the world than it buys. A deficit means the opposite. It's only one part of the bigger balance of payments, but people talk about it a lot in the news.It's like checking your allowance ledger — money coming in from selling lemonade minus money going out when you buy candy.
Real world: The U.S. often runs a trade deficit because we import more toys, clothes, and electronics than we export, so we send dollars overseas.
💡 A trade deficit isn't automatically bad — it can mean Americans are rich enough to buy cool stuff from everywhere — but big, long deficits can weaken the dollar over time.