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Notes -
If you think about it very in very reductive terms, I think it's pretty easy to understand where the potential problem is. Obviously if in your personal life you "import a greater value than you export" (buy things you cannot pay for) you might be In Trouble. It seems, intuitively, to be something like debt - maybe it is sometimes necessary, or sometimes even beneficial, but not something you want to make a habit of.
However Real Life Macroeconomics is not very reductive! So while I can intuitively see the problem with a trade deficit in theory I am not sure how well that actually captures the practice, particularly because "value" is a slippery thing. Maybe that's why I personally care a bit more about "limited autarky" than the trade balance, since I am not yet prepared to try to better understand macroeconomics in anything like a systematic way.
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