America is unable to export manufactured goods
Brad Sester points to the surprising success of Europe as an exporter
Keep in mind that the euro is a strong currency.
Brad Sester points out that the USA is still unable to export manufactured goods:
From Brad Sester:
1. Globalization hasn’t meant increased demand for U.S. exports of manufactures over time…
Exports of manufactures (using the SITC data from chemicals through miscellaneous manufactures) are no higher, as a share of U.S. GDP, than they were in the 1990s…
In fact, exports of manufactures are now, after the dollar's 2014 appreciation, about a percentage point of GDP below their average level in the 1990s.
Back when I first learned about trade, the usual story around gains from trade was that trade would allow the United States to specialize in advanced manufacturing, and trade its knowledge intensive goods for imported goods from the rest of the world. That isn’t the story that has played out in the data.
U.S. exports outside of North America are particularly small. Using the broadest possible definition of U.S. manufacturing exports—I used the NAICS data here, which includes a lot of food processing*—puts manufacturing exports beyond North America at less than 4 percent of U.S. GDP. Around a sixth of those exports are civil aircraft, aircraft engines, and aircraft parts—and thus are in a sector that is particularly exposed to the corona virus shock.
For better or for worse (I would say mostly for worse), manufactured exports are a sufficiently small share of the U.S. economy that they really would have trouble driving a U.S. recovery.
The United States’ limited extra-regional exports are also not just a function of the United States’ large size—European (EA) exports to the United States and China are now almost three times bigger than U.S. exports to Europe (EU) and China (as a share of each region's GDP). Back in 2009 and 2010, the Obama Administration liked to talk about how the U.S. recovery from the global financial crisis would be led by exports and investment.
But it turned out that Europe’s recovery was the one that was led by exports.