Donald Trump’s commerce secretary is determined to alter the terrible situation in which trillions of dollars of our investments are from foreign sources, including hostile countries, meaning America is deeply beholden to other unfriendly nations.
On Friday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted a chart on X and explained why: “In the mid-1980’s, our politicians began to run America into the ground with massive trade deficits. We used to have the upper hand, but these leaders sold out our leverage, our independence, and our future.”
He deplored the resulting crisis. “Now, in 2025, the rest of the world owns $26.5 TRILLION more of us than we do of them. That’s not just unsustainable. That’s insane,” Lutnick insisted. “Thankfully, we have President Trump who recognizes the extreme danger the trade deficit creates for our long term prosperity. We’re bringing our wealth, our factories, and our power back home where they belong.”
What a novel idea — putting American workers first. This is why Americans voted for Donald Trump.
Since the Great Financial Crisis, overseas capital generally headed one direction — it flocked to the US, with the US net international investment position recently peaking at approximately $26 trillion, or nearly 90% of US GDP in 2024. For many investors, the US was “the only game in town” for over a decade, and global capital pushed this trade as far as it could muster, while providing nearly unrelenting support to US exceptionalism… After years of US large-cap equity dominance, a major change in investor positioning is to seek non-US opportunities across multiple regions
In the past 15 years, while the United States economy was about 20% of the global economy, it represented about half of the global market value.
As you can probably tell, Calamos seems to want to frame the situation of excessive foreign investment as a positive, and the potential shift away from it as a negative. The latter is a negative in the sense that now America is in trouble because our dollar’s power depends very much on whether other countries still think it is worth accepting. But the previous situation was also a problem, because it meant far too much of us was owned by foreigners. The Founders warned against that long ago.
Fortunately, Lutnick is still feeling optimistic about the future, as he made clear in an Aug. 28 video. The commerce secretary declared, “The GDP numbers that came out this morning are impressive. The U.S. economy grew at 3.3% — that’s right. Donald Trump is fixing the Biden mess, and doing it at a record pace, 3.3% GDP growth for the United States of America. And what that did is it helped the United States hit a record $30 trillion economy. That’s right, the United States economy is now larger …in this quarter, larger — $30 trillion.”
He proudly insisted, “The Commerce Department, together with the president of the United States of America, have now put these record GDP numbers on the blockchain. So we’ve got the crypto president with the greatest $30 trillion economy in the world, putting out those numbers on the blockchain, this is how the Golden Age feels.”
It’s a new era of America First.
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