The Coming Global Trade Superstorm

Previously on Political Calculations, we featured our analysis of the trends over a series of 12-month rolling periods to track the rate of change in the balance of US-China trade, covering the period from January 1993 through January 2007. Our chart below shows the actual data and our generated trend lines:

The trend lines we generated are 6th-degree polynomials, which provided the best fit in going pretty much right down the middle of all the actual points of data. We've modified our original chart to show each trend line's corresponding polynomial equation:

We didn't think about this at the time, but 6th-degree polynomials like these underlie the climate change models behind the scientific consensus of global warming. We can therefore use our generated 6th-degree polynomials to extrapolate the future trend of trade between the US and China! Our next chart peeks out just one year into the future:

Pretty cool, huh? In the chart above, we see that the extrapolated rate of growth of U.S. exports to China will continue to grow, while the rate of growth of China's exports to the U.S. will bottom out and begin rising again. Let's next go two years out in our study of the future of US-China trade climatology:

Now isn't that something! After being relatively depressed, the growth rate of China's exports to the U.S. begins coming on strong, but still not growing as fast as the U.S.' exports to China. Let's next leap three years ahead in the trade-time continuum:

Talk about coming on strong - China's extrapolated rate of growth of its exports to the U.S. will be leaving the U.S. in the dust in the period from 2009 to 2010, as the rate of growth of U.S. exports to China stalls out. Let's next look five years ahead:

The five-year extrapolated forecast reveals that the rate of growth of U.S. exports to China is not just being left in the dust by the rate of growth of China's exports to the U.S., but being stomped on it too as the U.S. trade deficit takes a nasty turn to the downside. How bad can it get? Let's go out one more year:

By January 2013, even the idea of a trade balance between the U.S. and China is basically all over. The rate of growth of U.S. exports to China will have totally collapsed, while the growth rate of China's exports to the U.S. will be off the scale. The clear consensus of leading trade climatologists and scientists who use this sound scientific method is that the future of US-China trade is bleak and cannot be changed. Unless that is, President Lou Dobbs takes drastic action to impose severe quotas on China's exports to the U.S., before all jobs are outsourced from the U.S. to China for the sake of fulfilling U.S. demand for China's exports.

Only by doing so will the U.S. avoid destruction in the coming global trade superstorm.