Feb 4th, 2011
On Friday the US Treasury released its presumably semi-annual (it was due last October) report to Congress on currency issues, and in it refrained from calling any of the countries under review “currency manipulators.” Today’s People’s Daily had this to say : Major trading partners of the United States, including China, did not manipulate their currencies [...]
Nov 10th, 2010
China reported an October trade surplus of $27 billion Wednesday. This is a very big number and not one likely to soothe anger directed at China. It will be very hard for China credibly to argue that it is trying to contribute to global growth while pulling in more and more foreign demand. Here is [...]
Nov 4th, 2010
In the debate about global trade imbalances, we often hear it said that because Americans produce nothing that China exports to the US, any move to restrict Chinese imports to the US would have no employment effect on Americans. A forced contraction in Chinese exports would simply result in an equivalent increase in the exports [...]
Oct 14th, 2010
Earlier this week I had a debate on TV with a local economist on the subject of trade relations. We had the same debate about six and twelve months ago and in each case while I argued that the trade problems were almost intractable and trade relations would inexorably deteriorate, he both times acknowledged that [...]