I don’t have much time today as I am travelling a lot in the next few days for various work commitments. But recently I did a podcast for Real Progressives in the US about trade and the external economy. I started the discussion with an interesting quote that I will reproduce here. Regular readers will know that there are several so-called progressive critics of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) who focus on the way we construct the external economy. They claim it is ridiculous to think of exports as a cost and imports as a benefit and extend that argument to narratives about the advantages of maintaining a strong export-oriented manufacturing sector. Whether we want a strong manufacturing sector is a quite separate discussion from the trade issue. That is what the podcast was about.