"For 2018, the goods and services deficit was $621.0 billion, up $68.8 billion from $552.3 billion in 2017," the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis said in a press release on Wednesday.
READ MORE: Trump Demands China Lift All Tariffs on US Agricultural Goods
The December trade gap jumped to $59.8 billion, which was also a 10-year high, according to media reports.
The US merchandise trade deficit increased by $83.8 billion, or 10.4 percent, to $891.3 billion in the past year, the Commerce Department said. According to the Washington Post, it is the largest merchandise trade deficit in the 243-year history of the United States.
China and the United States have been embroiled in a trade dispute since last June, when Trump announced that the United States would subject $50 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25 percent tariffs in a bid to fix the US-Chinese trade deficit. Since then, the two countries have exchanged several rounds of tit-for-tat trade tariffs.
Trump announced in a Twitter post last month that he would delay another planned increase in tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods that was originally set for 1 March.
Prior to that, at the G20 summit in Argentina in December, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed upon a 90-day truce to allow room for a new trade agreement.
