NEWBY: Thanks. That all makes a lot

NEWBY: Thanks. That all makes a lot of sense. So let’s turn to the other side of the balance sheet and look at imports. How are imports being affected?DOLLAR: Right. So we’ve had a pretty serious compression of imports. And again, it tends to be concentrated in some specific areas. It’s no surprise our imports of crude oil are down by about 40 percent. People are driving a lot less. Like, I hardly use my car anymore. I’ve been wondering maybe I should stop paying insurance or maybe sell off the car since I never drive it anymore. And the quick statistics that come out are in current U.S. dollars, so that decline is a reflection that we’re importing a lot less oil. Plus, the price went down quite a lot. So what we’re spending on oil is down very dramatically.I was also curious to see that things like auto imports are way down. We have this integrated auto production with Canada and Mexico, so we both export and import. They’re both down, and I think that reflects the reality that sales pretty much everywhere are down. But also cell phones and televisions—our imports are down about 25 percent. And pretty much all the televisions and cell phones used in the U.S. are imported. So that’s a pretty good indication about the whole market.I thought perhaps some people were sitting at home ordering plasma TVs in order to make lock down a little bit more pleasant. And I’m sure some of that’s happening, but on average, people are holding off on these big ticket items, probably reluctant to go out to retailers. And also, everybody’s worried about their income. What’s going to happen? So you hold off on the big purchases and then that’s reflected pretty dramatically. Then on the other side of the ledger, our imports of medical equipment are holding up and imports of pharmaceuticals are up about 15 percent. So this kind of crisis is always going to create some opportunities for particular industries and it’s going to create really serious problems for some of the sectors I’ve mentioned.