Just in 2017, the US had a $64 billion trade deficit with Germany. 2016 was pretty much the same, and as I said, it's been like that for a long, long time.
And no, that's not by dumping cheap products due to low labor costs. Labor costs in the industrial sector tend to be quite a bit higher in Germany, strong unions and labor protection and all that awful "socialist" stuff.
The surplus is because German products are high quality and are in demand. In fact, most of the top categories of exports are the same for the US and Germany, so it's a pretty direct competition.
Overall, the US trade deficit was $478 billion in 2016. Recently, Germany had a trade surplus with China, despite the much lower Chinese wages.
The US current accounts deficit is very similar in scale, at $462 billion in 2017. That's the difference between the amount that the US (private+public) borrowed from foreign countries and the amount that foreign countries borrowed from the US.
Would you please stop using HN for flamewars? It's totally not ok, and you've done it a lot and we've had to warn you about it repeatedly. You've posted many awesome things to Hacker News so we'd hate to ban you, but protecting the site from flames is more important. This is a problem we need you to fix.
Please read and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and help take care of this place instead of helping to wreck it. I'm sure you wouldn't fuel flames in a forest or a garden, so please don't fuel them here.
The most recent moderation reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288896. If it doesn't read like a warning, that's out of politeness and respect for your positive contributions to HN.
It's true that your most recent history doesn't contain ideological flamewar (not counting this nationalistic spat), which is great. Nonetheless it has noticeably been a problem in the past, and your comments still sometimes contain uncivil swipes that need to be edited out.
Seriously picking a car industry which is and always had been different in the US than in Eu is a shitty example to prove a point. If it would not be for your liberal americans throwing billions at your german cars they would be nothing compared to what they are now. Ever been to SK ? How many non korean cars have you seen ?
The entire IT industry dwarfs everything Europe has or will have in the next decades and still it is just a fraction of the US of A produces or trades with the world.
Besides Germany is your China of europe dumping shit to weaker markets en masse. Just looking at the list of largest german companies gives you a hint of how Germany really operates.
> Seriously picking a car industry which is and always had been different in the US than in Eu is a shitty example to prove a point. (etc)
I'm not trying to "prove a point". You asked for an example ("Where and how are the german companies beating the US ?") and I gave you one: German car companies are beating american car companies in the us.
So before you change the subject into china, south korea, the IT industry, weaker markets, mass production, and so on and on, can you first acknowledge that you asked for an example of German companies beating american ones, and I gave you exactly one such example?
You violated the site guidelines badly more than once in this wretched flamewar. That's bad, and we ban accounts that do this. We've also had to warn you before about this.
Would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site only as intended from now on? The rules are the way they are because we don't want this community to destroy itself. If it's valuable enough for you to participate in, it's valuable enough for you to help preserve it. Helping to wreck it is incongruent, and I'm sure you're not doing that intentionally, but unfortunately the effects are the same, and we have to moderate by effects (not intent, which we don't have direct access to).
And I'm sure that you know that is not true. You can't possibly believe that someone who says "but what can i expect from a german" does not know exactly the effect he will provoke on the other person.
And no, that's not by dumping cheap products due to low labor costs. Labor costs in the industrial sector tend to be quite a bit higher in Germany, strong unions and labor protection and all that awful "socialist" stuff.
The surplus is because German products are high quality and are in demand. In fact, most of the top categories of exports are the same for the US and Germany, so it's a pretty direct competition.
Overall, the US trade deficit was $478 billion in 2016. Recently, Germany had a trade surplus with China, despite the much lower Chinese wages.
The US current accounts deficit is very similar in scale, at $462 billion in 2017. That's the difference between the amount that the US (private+public) borrowed from foreign countries and the amount that foreign countries borrowed from the US.