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Notes -
the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.
the classical argument against tariffs is the change in trade they produce is bad. so if you find some technique that produces the same change then it just seems like you have come up with some abstraction to try and hide that you are doing the bad thing. tariffs would be a great tax if they did not produce a change in trade.
I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.
*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.
** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.
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