The Achilles' heel of Trump's economics

US president-elect Donald Trump's economic strategy is severely flawed. He wants to restore growth via deficit spending in a country with a chronic shortfall in savings, which points to a further compression in national savings, making a widening of an already outsize trade gap all but inevitable.

That dynamic unmasks the Achilles' heel of Trump's economics, or "Trumponomics": a blatant protectionist bias that collides head-on with the United States' inescapable reliance on foreign savings and trade deficits to sustain economic growth.

The incoming Trump administration will not inherit a strong and sound US economy. The pace of recovery since the global financial crisis has been running at half that of normal cyclical rebounds - all the more disturbing given the massive size of the contraction in 2008-09. And savings, the seed of future prosperity, remain in woefully short supply. The so-called net national savings rate - the depreciation-adjusted sum of business, household and government savings - stood at just 2.4 percent of national income in mid-2016. While that's an improvement from the unprecedented negative savings position in 2008-11, it remains far short of the 6.3 percent average that prevailed over the final three decades of the 20th century.