We had positive cash flow in Specie and in Services, and we come out that year in the positive. 7.3 Million to the good.
The numbers are roughly equal. Did you expect them to be absolutely perfectly equal year after year?
They go up, they go down, but over time, they are roughly equal.
The imbalance of merchandise bought and sold totaled a deficit of $715.3 million dollars.
I don't see where you got that number. The Chart you showed says our indebtedness was 379.2 million dollars in 1860. That represents a little more than a years worth of trade value collectively for 40 years worth of trading.
It works out to a trade deficit of .98 million deficit each year, which is not a large percentage of the total trade.
To make your point that export value and import value must be regarded as different, you have to show a lot worse trade deficits than this. We were running a long term trade deficit, but on a year to year basis it wasn't very much.
This looks to me like an attempt to deliberately get the discussion into the weeds where the complexities of accounting for all the pennies allow you to ignore the larger reality that the South was producing most of the Trade with Europe, and that the North was going to lose a huge amount of money if they allowed the South to be free of them.
In your post 417 you write:
“Imports are payment for exports. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? They must be roughly equal over time.”
I researched the numbers, and this was not the case. The aggregate imbalance between 1790 and 1860 was $379.2 million, worth about $10.5 billion today.
By adding the accounting for merchandise traded between 1820 and 1860, I arrived at the figure of $715.3 million more goods imported than exported. The total trade imbalance for that same period shows a total deficit of $275.70, worth about $7.64 billion today.
On what basis can you call these “roughly equal.”