The United States trade deficit widened in 2024, with imports totaling $4.11 trillion and exports totaling $3.2 trillion, resulting in a deficit of more than $918 billion, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
“For 2024, the goods and services deficit was $918.4 billion, up $133.5 billion from $784.9 billion in 2023,” BEA said in a Feb. 5 statement.
The deficit is up by more than 17 percent on an annual basis and is the largest since 2021. The trade deficit was equivalent to 3.1 percent of the 2024 GDP, up from 2.8 percent from the previous year.
“The US trade deficit is wider than ever. Wider even than its previous peak in early 2022, when COVID recovery was sucking in goods imports,” Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a Feb. 5 post on social media platform X. “The question is what to do about this. If the US really wants to get this under control, the first stop is to shrink the fiscal deficit.”…