Trade Surplus

If you're a country, you want this.

You traded goods back and forth all over the world. The U.S. ships out reality TV shows; we import wine. Add up all of the 18,000+ items we trade in, internationally, and we get a total. You want to have surplus, or excess, or profits from country-to-country trade. You don't want deficits; you want surplus. If you go a long time with deficits, you end up with lots of debt and a weak currency (huge supply of your currency existing in the ownership coffers of other countries), and all kinds of other bad power dynamics happen.

So, yeah. You want to be more of a supplier of stuff to the world...rather than the other way around. You want a surplus, not a sur...minus.