Another Jeremiad from the FT:

"Trump’s justification hinges on a naive belief that treats trade imbalances as if they were the profit and loss account of a business, and not the culmination of highly specialised supply chains. He also considers factory work to be the fount of economic development, ignoring how decades of free trade has enabled America to rise up the industrial value chain and become a global leader in services and innovation."

No, the FT is right. Factory work is not "the fount of economic development". In fact, capitalism invariably "farms out" manufacturing to its peripheral regions and nations, keeping its "command centre" (as Schumpeter called it) in the metropole (compare also Krugman's notion of "clusters"). Yet, a nation that becomes the linchpin or pivot of finance capital inevitably has an overvalued currency that induces excessive and crippling concentration on "services and innovation" with consequential reliance on material physical supplies from primary resource and manufacturing nations! And because "a gun in hand is worth more than the best blueprints", a deindustrialized America rapidly emulates the fate of the dodo and other extinct species! (Remember Paolo Sylos-Labini: steel is not the equivalent of bananas ".)