Main PageOctober 28, 2026

US September advance goods trade balance -134.9 billion vs -130.2 billion expected

  • Prior was -132.6

These are the two worst back-to-back months since just before Liberation Day, when goods were flooding into the US to try to front-run Trump’s tariffs. Excluding Jan-Mar 2025, it’s the worst two-month period ever. Needless to say, tariffs aren’t working.

For background, the advance goods trade balance is part of the Census Bureau’s Advance Economic Indicators report, released at 8:30 am ET roughly four weeks after the reference month ends. The same release includes advance estimates for wholesale and retail inventories, making it one of the more useful early inputs for tracking GDP.

The headline figure is the US deficit in goods trade, the difference between the value of goods exported and imported. It’s broken down by end-use category: foods, feeds and beverages; industrial supplies and materials; capital goods; automotive vehicles and parts; consumer goods; and other goods. The figures are seasonally adjusted and in nominal dollars, on a Census basis.

The advance report covers goods only. Services trade, where the US runs a surplus, is added in the full international trade report from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, published about a week later. That full report also includes country-level detail and revisions to the advance goods figures.

The data matter mainly for GDP. Net exports are a component of growth, and a wider goods deficit generally subtracts from GDP while a narrower one adds to it. Combined with the inventory figures in the same release, the report often prompts economists and tracking models such as the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow to revise their estimates.

Trade flows have become far more volatile in recent years. Companies have rushed imports in ahead of tariffs and then pulled back, creating sharp swings in the deficit and in quarterly GDP. Large movements in nonmonetary gold, recorded under industrial supplies, have added further distortions that economists often strip out to judge the underlying trend.

This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.