Disagree. It’s easier to blame Trump if he’s in power. Wait 10 days and 3 hours.
Not sure if General Hull is mentioned in American history classes but some of his 1812 proclamation could have been written today.
“Where America is heading” could also be “Where America has been”.
“Your choice lies between these & WAR, slavery, and destruction.”
“Yes, you can be a slave to GB, or, you can own slaves as an American!”
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Free market capitalism doesn’t exist anymore, certainly doesn’t exist in China. Everything is controlled by the CCP. The strategy they use is the same strategy that tech firms use. The idea is to make things inexpensive (or free) to capture the market. Play the long game. Eventually you have so much market power that nobody even bothers to challenge you. Chinese companies can do this because they have the backing of the CCP. This is not free market capitalism at all. And the worst part is that this type of approach is starting to appeal to American corporations. They want the US government to favor them, protect them, etc. We will certainly see a lot of that with Trump.
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China isn’t a command economy. They just have state owned companies and the public sector participates in the economy. The west does the same but not to the same extent. Their choice really.
Every country subsidises. Just the other day the cost of the Canadian
Subsidies for the motor vehicle manufacturers were shown by Mr Cooke. That’s just how these modern economies work. If you remember this exact thing is why IMF structural reforms never worked because they basically just opened countries up to be plundered by western companies. The real problem is China just does it more and better against the west now.
I understand your angst. The feeling that these guys want to take away everything that defines who we are and then impoverish us. The only thing that matters to them
Is money. To you this is invasion, to me this is substitution because this is how the world has operated for as far back as the west has been the dominant powers. So long as there is no appreciation that this is the bed that has been made, that companies need to be responsible and sustainable corporations, that they should enrich the people around them then there is no real argument to say China should adhere to standards they don’t care for because who dares wins.
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Sometimes when we have these discussions they become theoretical and the real impact of western companies isn’t clear.
Banro is a Canadian mining company that mines in Eastern Congo the side where there is a war lord. They don’t pay tax to DRC and move gold out illegally. They fund the war lord. They are well known for forceful eviction of the locals and unsafe mining practices that result in destruction of water sources or explosions that resulted in rocks destroying villages and killing people. Incidentally they are the biggest gold miner in the world based of the mining they do in DRC.
https://miningwatch.ca/blog/2020/1/10/banro-corporation-democratic-republic-congo
It’s not just about money, it’s about preserving the CCP. Look at what happened to Jon Stewart. He was forced to drop a deal with Apple because apparently he wasn’t allowed to talk trash about China during the show. This is the real impact of China trade.
China has different norms, as best i can tell Trump is trying to emulate Chonese norms.
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This is exactly what Israel does. How many people have been cancelled because of fair criticism of Israel? In the USA we all know you don’t want to criticise Israel or talk about Palestine on.pain of ruin. It’s so unamerican it feels like being terrorised.
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A decades-long fight to unite church and state:
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to make taxpayer-funded school vouchers available not just to the poor but to the wealthy.
Helping the poor was never the point. They were just the toehold necessary to start the programs sending money to parochial schools.
From there, we expand the programs to rich kids, who overwhelmingly flock to the private parochial schools. Because standardized testing ultimately measures wealth and all the wealth just left, public schools do badly on testing and therefore funding gets redirected to private schools.
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Um, lower labor costs? Stronger local supply chain wrt batteries especially?
It’s the same plan they have for pretty much all aspects of public life. Do their best to break the government system and then come to the rescue by privatizing everything. Pure profit. This has the added bonus of smashing the wall between church and state.
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Lots of chatter about AI and the need to compete against China. The big tech firms want more data to train their models and they are envious of chinese firms who have access to larger data sets due to a lack of data privacy laws in China. Americans, being so heavily invested in tech, will probably allow this. We’re staring down full tech oligarchy with Trump at the helm.
Having lower labor costs is not the basis for trade. The reason why it seems like China competes on the basis of competitive advantage (low cost) is because they are purposefully flooding the market with product (overcapacity). This is not how free trade is supposed to work. The Chinese aren’t buying what they’re making. They’re basically working in factories all day long and buying real estate with their huge savings. This is unsustainable. eventually they will have to buy their own production and there will be a shortage of inexpensive chinese goods in the rest of the world. That’s why tariffs are needed. It just normalizes the market. When China stops f-around, the tariffs can be lowered.
It can be. I never took macro, but my kids did and I am pretty sure this is a classic textbook example of reasons for trade.
That’s the key. If China’s government is influencing the building of excess capacity with financial incentives (seems like they have) that runs counter to “free trade” ideals that we try to capture in our trading treaties, hence the “dumping” claims under WTO rules. If corporate decision makers in China were free to decide how much to make, and decided to build more capacity than needed for internal consumption without government subsidies, that would be “free” trade.
I thought I’d post this:
**–Our citizens are not only consumers.** They are also workers and the quality of their lives depend in part on jobs with dignity that provide them with a fair share of the pie they’re helping to bake. This is core precept of Bidenomics, and it is one reason why full employment labor markets and union power are so important to us, as they helped to ensure that fair slice is served up. But in the trade space, it means we will shape policy to block unfair trade that undermines key sectors of our workforce.–Fighting climate change requires significant government intervention and international cooperation. I’ve stressed the importance of our policy agenda in this space, but this is obviously an area where we continue to work closely with our trading partners. Working together with G-20 and more countries to row in the same direction is always a challenge, but we have no choice. And we’ve made real progress, in no small part because there is a recognition of the urgency of this challenge.
–Trade policy is not just economics. It’s political economics. Like the old adage, those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, those who ignore the social and political fallout from non-worker-centered trade policies should expect to live with a politics dominated by xenophobia, isolationism, and authoritarianism.
–Unfair trade exists. Obviously, “unfair” is a highly unspecific term, but the recent overcapacity debate I noted earlier is a highly tangible example. There is a deep and important literature on mercantile trade regimes, beggar-thy-neighbor, or in its more contemporary vintage, savings-glut economics. In such cases, and China is once again a salient example, countries suppress consumer spending, thereby boosting savings. Those excess savings are then exported in the forms of excess capacity and/or bubble-inducing financial flows. As economist Michael Pettis has long stressed, the true and powerful economics of comparative advantage are thwarted when countries don’t export to import, but export to build market share through economically large and persistent trade surpluses, matched by equally persistent current account deficits held by their trading partners.
This is the key:
As economist Michael Pettis has long stressed, the true and powerful economics of comparative advantage are thwarted when countries don’t export to import, but export to build market share through economically large and persistent trade surpluses, matched by equally persistent current account deficits held by their trading partners.
An article in FT from pettis:
But the losers of the West buying cheap EVs are the Chinese, since they’re implicitly getting taxed and then using that tax to lower the price I pay.
Now you might be worried about China getting more technologically advanced, but EVs are not some cutting edge product. We have no technological gap with EVs. Let’s let the Chinese gvt subsidize my car buying temporarily.
It’s a bit like someone in the stock market is trying to sell at a really low price and you refuse to buy it…
Yes, there is a tech gap with EVs, in batteries in particular. The danger in offshoring is if it kills the industry here, and source is cut off. These are capital-intensive industries and you can’t build up from scratch in less than thousands of days.
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We may have the tech to build one by hand. There’s a different level of tech in having factories filled with machine tools and supplier networks to build millions.
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