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No two ways about it. Until the longer term revisions come in, the first quarter of 2021 was a lousy one for inflation-adjusted U.S. trade flows – and lousy to a record extent. The only possible positive takeaway:  These numbers and the trends underlying them might be just as transitory and CCP Virus-induced as I (and many others)  believe today’s high inflation numbers are   

According to today’s final (for now) Commerce Department read on economic growth for the first three months of this year, the real gross domestic product (GDP – the government’s measure for the economy’s size) increased by 6.21 percent on an annual basis.

That’s an excellent figure although (like virtually all other economic data) it’s a considerably artificial number (because of the sudden reopening of the economy after equally sudden government-mandated shutdowns and resulting consumer caution), and although it’s a bit less than the 6.25 percent estimated last month. Indeed, it’s a big improvement over the 4.26 percent registered in the fourth quarter of last year

But the after-inflation trade deficit figures just keep rising – and reaching all-time highs. The initial read on this constant dollar trade gap for the first quarter was an annualized $1.1755 trillion. Last month, this figure was revised up to $1.1939 trillion. This morning’s result: $1.2123 trillion. Consequently, the price-adjusted first quarter trade deficit turns out to be 8.05 percent worse than the fourth quarter’s $1.1220 trillion.

Optimists can note that this sequential increase was smaller than the 10.12 percent rise between the third and fourth quarters of last year. But this slowdown is pretty modest.

Since the real trade deficit figure is higher than previously reported and grew faster, and the total economy grew slightly more slowly in inflation-adjusted terms, the trade shortfall’s bite into growth was bigger – 1.50 percent out of the 6.21 percent increase as opposed to the previously reported 1.25 percent out of 6.25 percent growth.

This means that, had the real trade deficit simply remain unchanged, the economy would have expanded 24.15 percent more after inflation in the first quarter. The previous GDP read yielded a figure of 20 percent.

In glass-half-full terms, that’s a smaller subtraction from growth than the multi-decade high 35.92 percent suffered in the fourth quarter. But it’s a lot of foregone growth nonetheless.

The constant dollar trade deficit as a share of GDP hit another new record, too – 6.35 percent. Upon recalling that the previous pre-pandemic high of 6.10 percent came in the fourth quarter of 2005, during the bubble whose bursting brought on the global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, that could be an ominous development.

And more bad news: The worsening of the real trade deficit came on both the export and import fronts in the first quarter. Today’s GDP report showed that inflation-adjusted U.S. overseas sales of goods and services dropped sequentially by 0.53 percent, while total American purchases from abroad increased by 2.30 percent.

So do these new figures foreshadow the new post-CCP Virus normal for U.S. trade – despite (or because of?) the Trump tariffs? We’ll find out more about the effects of trade policy once the next official monthly U.S. trade figures (for May) come out next Friday. 

For now, though (and probably after those new data), the most responsible answer I can provide is, “It’s too soon to tell.” Indeed, as if the U.S. economy still wasn’t being distorted enough by the rapid transition from pandemic-induced recession to robust expansion, and still facing enough consequent uncertainties, on top of the ongoing congestion at U.S. West Coast ports, a big logjam has emerged at a giant port in export-heavy China.

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell noted that “This is an extraordinarily unusual time, and we really don’t have a template or any experience in a situation like this. We have to be humble about our ability to understand the data.” As the new U.S. GDP report should be making clear, American trade flows are no exception.

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