Love the optimism. The rolling average thing with Japan is interesting, can you recommend anywhere we can read more about that?

Also, what's the mechanism by which the US achieves it--in other words, if it looks like the deficit is going higher in a given year than allowed under the rolling average thing, do you impose tariffs, simply ban the imports, how did it work in practice with Japan?

Finally, the least persuasive part for me was that China will easily accept it. AFAIK China is not battling any more or less inflationary pressure than it has at periods in the last 20 years, so why would the same inflationary pressure suddenly be leverage for them to accept reduced exports (and hence lower growth and higher unemployment)? And for transfer pricing, if I understand you, by banning imports the US would encourage Chinese firms to invest abroad, but how would the US decreeing that China can't export as much suddenly make building a factory in the US (and hence available for transfer pricing as I believe you were saying) a good idea in and of itself?

That said, I personally like discussion of any idea which addresses the imbalanced trade relationship caused by China's absurdly skewed domestic distribution of income (the consequences of which--overinvestment and "unhealthy" "growth"-- Xi himself has acknowledged must be fixed), so thanks for sharing.

I have been partial to 1) pushing for trade agreements which specifically address these imbalances (by pushing China/Germany/Japan to balance domestic income), and 2) since those countries are unlikely to rebalance willingly, taxing their capital exports (since the current account must change to match capital account i.e. you have to run a deficit if other countries are pushing massive amounts of capital on the world/dollar as China does and also Germany to an extent) would seem to me to be the most direct way to prevent China from imbalancing its domestic income distribution and using part of the surplus taken from households to buy dollar assets. If they were suddenly taxed so they couldn't buy those assets as easily, their whole model would make less sense and that would apply major pressure to change it.