Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 09, 2025

9: Tariff Chaos

For U.S. and China, a Risky Game of Chicken With No Off-Ramp in Sight Neither side wants to look weak by backing down on tariffs. But if their trade relationship collapses, the global consequences could be profound.

‘Totally Silly.’ Trump’s Focus on Trade Deficit Bewilders Economists. Behind Trump’s new tariffs is a goal that is as ambitious as it is unrealistic: eliminating the bilateral trade deficit with every U.S. trading partner.
‘We’re Playing With Fire’: The Risks of Trump’s Tariffs on China Binyamin Appelbaum on the president’s rushed and rash trade war.
Trump and Netanyahu Steer Toward an Ugly World, Together
There’s Nothing Real About Trump’s ‘Real America’
How Trump Wiped Out $10 Trillion in Wealth in 3 Days
A Playbook for Standing Up to President Trump the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances. ....... law firms have already won court rulings that block Mr. Trump’s executive orders against them. ....... Courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result; prevented him from adding a citizenship question to the census; and blocked his family-separation policy at the southern border. A grass-roots political movement helped defeat his effort to repeal Obamacare even though Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. ........ Anybody who has dealt with a schoolyard bully should recognize this principle: The illusion of invincibility is often his greatest asset. .......... One firm that was subject to an executive order — Paul, Weiss — surrendered and promised concessions, including $40 million in pro bono work for Trump-friendly causes. Three other firms — Milbank; Skadden, Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — proactively agreed to deals with the White House and made their own concessions. ......... A crucial fact about these agreements is that they include no binding promises from the White House. Mr. Trump can threaten the firms again whenever he chooses and demand further concessions. These firms are in virtual receivership to Mr. Trump. So is Columbia, which yielded to Mr. Trump after he threatened its federal funding. The university did not even win the restoration of that funding when it agreed to his demands; it won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration........... “Once you make concessions once, it’s hard not to make them again,” Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University and a legal scholar by training, said when discussing the attacks on higher education. .......... The three law firms that have filed suits to block Mr. Trump’s executive orders — Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — provide a model. So far, they are winning in court. Importantly, they have won the backing of many conservatives. As our counterparts on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, Mr. Trump’s campaign against law firms “breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice.” ........... Already, some students at top law schools say they will no longer interview with firms like Skadden. “We’re not looking to sacrifice our moral values,” one student at Georgetown University said. .......... The United States is home to an outsize share of financial and corporate activity partly because investors have confidence that the rule of law prevails here. If political power instead supersedes signed contracts and the rule of law, American business will suffer.

The Trump White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. It Got It All Wrong. My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime, was: How on earth did it calculate such huge rates? Reciprocal tariffs, after all, are supposed to treat other countries the way they treat us, and foreign tariffs on American goods are nowhere near these levels......... Americans spend more on clothing made in Sri Lanka than Sri Lankans spend on American pharmaceuticals and gas turbines. So what? That pattern reflects differences in natural resources, comparative advantage and development levels. The deficit numbers don’t suggest, let alone prove, unfair competition...........

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow explained why when he quipped, “I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me.”

.......... A large tariff on Japanese auto parts could cause an increase in demand for imports from Mexico and vice versa. And the tariffs clearly invite retaliation and may over time increase the dollar’s value, both factors that would most likely depress U.S. exports. ........... We found that tariffs of, say, 20 percent caused domestic importers to pay nearly 19 percent more. This represents a pass-through into import prices of about 95 percent, which is the value I would have plugged into the government’s tariff formula. In simple terms, that implies that the price paid for U.S. imports would rise almost as much as the tariff rate.

Immigration Enforcement Under Trump Is Going Rogue Federal law enforcement under President Trump is engaged in dangerous political theater, with high-profile arrests of non-citizen students, workers and parents set up to score political points more than to protect national security........... Right now, the government is burning thousands of federal law enforcement hours on operations that privilege political objectives over public safety, attacking constitutional protections like due process and free speech as they do. If this administration doesn’t correct course, it will lock the country into a future of weaker enforcement, lowered trust in public safety officials and greater risk to Americans’ collective safety. .......... As each successive administration relied more on executive power to manage the system, Congress did not pass structured, long-term immigration reform. ........... The new Trump White House is finding ever more cruel, even brutal, methods to publicly target some of the most vulnerable people in this country. While Americans are distracted by sensational videos of anti-migrant enforcement actions from the Trump administration on social media, the real threats grow. ........ The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, recently announced that federal agents arrested roughly 20,000 undocumented people across the country in February. That doesn’t mean 20,000 national security threats were removed from the United States. On average, the United States can deport only about 7,000 to 9,000 people monthly by plane, and detention centers were at maximum capacity. So what happened to the 13,000 other migrants who were arrested? The only rational law enforcement step would be to process and then release them. That means law enforcement’s time, energy and focus were wasted on a political stunt. .............. Every ICE agent dispatched to detain a noncriminal farmworker, construction laborer or college student — many, if not most, of whom have legal standing to work and study in our communities — is an ICE agent not investigating fentanyl networks, cyberattacks, human trafficking or transnational gangs. Those are the actual bad actors who threaten American safety and sovereignty. .......... ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have greater authority than most Americans realize. They can detain people without a warrant, conduct searches without probable cause and deport people without criminal charges. These powers demand discipline, not spectacle. ........... They do not exist to target migrant grandmothers from Guatemala, unaccompanied children fleeing gang violence, Haitian families seeking asylum from political collapse, Palestinian and Indian students who attended U.S. universities under lawful visas, or Mexican and Salvadoran families working and raising U.S. citizen children while trapped in immigration backlogs. ............ When ICE and C.B.P. are used in this manner, their mission is compromised. Career agents are sidelined. Morale drops. Recruitment suffers. When communities see federal law enforcement used to punish rather than to protect, they stop cooperating. Law enforcement loses tips, and witnesses. Local partners hesitate to share information. That’s how dangerous actors slip through. ............. The real bad actors are getting smarter and faster. Mexican cartels use tunnels and ultralight aircraft to move narcotics. Cybercriminals attack hospitals and rural infrastructure. International smuggling operations launder profits through cryptocurrency.

After I Self-Deported From the U.S., My Life Improved That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America............ In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life. ........ Acquiring a British spouse visa was straightforward, in my experience smoother than America’s processes. My new start in London was suffused with unfamiliar optimism. Freed from being undocumented, and even without a bachelor’s degree, I graduated with two master’s degrees, one from Cambridge University in creative writing. ......... In tears of guilt, I remembered my parents, struggling in the ’90s to be legalized, fleeced by unscrupulous immigration lawyers until time ran out on their tourist visas.

A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess The federal government’s ability to regulate immigration, a basic function of any nation, is broken. Over the past four years, some eight million people settled in the United States, and most of them did so unlawfully. Instead of an immigration policy calibrated to the needs of the country, both Americans and immigrants are being let down by a set of outdated laws inconsistently enforced by underfunded agencies. Chaos has been a predictable result........ mass deportations, or reductions in future immigration, are not in the national interest. .........

Immigrants are America’s rocket fuel, powering our nation’s unsurpassed economic and cultural achievements.

The famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty mischaracterizes those who leave their home countries behind. They are not the tired and the poor; they are people possessed of the determination, skill and resources to seek a better life. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 142 immigrants to the United States. Nearly half of the companies in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Blue jeans, Tesla, basketball, “God Bless America” — all the work of immigrants............... There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year. ............. Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades. ............ In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.” ........... Democrats should embrace the need to control who enters the country. High rates of immigration across Europe and North America have not led to more tolerance of newcomers but instead have led to a resurgence of nativist political movements that have shaken liberal democracy. Climate change is likely to increase the pressure by propelling more migrants to search for safety and opportunity. The United States cannot admit everyone who wishes to come, and the choice of who may come should be intentional, not a result of a government’s lack of the will and the capacity to enforce its own laws.......... But as immigrants spend the money they earn, they create more jobs than they fill. ......... The C.B.O. predicts that by 2034, because of the surge in immigration, the nation’s annual economic output will be 3 percent larger. ......... in a study published in 2017, the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan found that the current generation of immigrants was assimilating culturally and prospering economically at essentially the same pace as previous generations. ........... “The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago,” they wrote in “Streets of Gold,” a 2022 book describing their research. ............. In contrast to Houston, Alabama, in 2011, passed what was then the most restrictive anti-immigration measure in the country. It prohibited hiring, renting property to or transporting undocumented immigrants. It denied financial aid at state universities to undocumented students. Some parts of the law have since been repealed, but the state’s politicians continue to demonize immigrants, even though Alabama has relatively few. .......... The state’s hostility to immigration helps to explain why Birmingham has lost population in every decade since 1960. It is a city of unfilled spaces — vacant lots, parking lots — and of open jobs. Alabama in August had just 55 available workers for every 100 job openings, among the lowest rates in the country ............... In 1965, the Black playwright Douglas Turner Ward premiered a one-act satire that revolved around the premise that all of the Black workers in a Southern town had disappeared. Homes went uncleaned. Babies went unfed. The town’s factories were shuttered. A local businessman complained that “the absence of handymen, porters, sweepers, stock-movers, deliverers and miscellaneous dirty-work doers is disrupting the smooth harmony of marketing!” ............. Immigrants are now the dirty-work doers. Americans rely on people born in other countries to pick crops, pluck chickens, build homes. Visit a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the day, and you will find the streets alive with immigrants caring for the children, the dogs and the lawns. ............ It is a bitter irony that even as the United States was ending the legal segregation of African Americans, it was effectively creating a new caste system in which many immigrants were enlisted as workers but excluded from becoming citizens. Roughly 11 million people, one-fourth of the foreign-born population, do not have permission to live here. ............. Mr. Trump will not succeed in making immigrants disappear. During his first term, he deported 325,000 people who were living in the U.S. Even if he deports 10 times as many in his second term, a volume many experts regard as beyond the government’s capacity, millions of immigrants would remain in the country, more vulnerable to exploitation because it will be dangerous for them to seek help. ............. Americans face a choice between perpetuating a society maintained by an underclass of unauthorized workers or moving closer to the democratic ideal of a nation of citizens — a nation in which all are equal before the law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1958, “citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.” ........ In the mid-2000s, Todd Davis, chief executive of an identity-protection company called LifeLock, published his Social Security number on billboards as a marketing gimmick. A Houston lawyer who works on immigration cases said he found at least 165 instances in which undocumented workers in the Houston area used Mr. Davis’s number. ............ The government’s longstanding focus on policing immigrants rather than employers is akin to arresting drug users rather than dealers, and it has been roughly as successful. ......... He was caught at the border five times before he succeeded in crossing on the sixth attempt. In Houston, he took a job as a dishwasher. Four decades later, he is a Houston icon, the chef and a co-owner of a string of celebrated restaurants. “I put my life at risk to come here, and I would do it in a heartbeat again and again and again,” he said.

Immigration Is Great for Jobs, Actually We’ve been able to achieve large increases in overall employment only because working-age immigrants have been coming to America. If we didn’t have the immigrants, we wouldn’t have the jobs.

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Tuesday, April 08, 2025

8: Trade, Tariff, Trump

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8: Trade War

China Tries to Downplay the Trade War’s Effects on Its Economy Faced with economic disruption, Beijing is presenting itself as too powerful to succumb to U.S. pressure. It is also censoring criticism at home. ....... Things will be painful, but it is nothing that the country cannot handle....... and that China could potentially come out stronger as a result. ...... “China is a super economy. We are strong and resilient in the face of the U.S. tariff bullying.” ........ It wants to be seen as a responsible champion of fair trade that is too powerful to succumb to U.S. pressure. ........ China was prepared to weather Mr. Trump’s tariffs because it was no longer as reliant on the U.S. market for its exports. ....... China responded to Mr. Trump’s tariffs by putting 11 American companies on an unreliable entities list, and another 16 on an export control list. It also announced export controls on medium and heavy rare earths. That was in addition to slapping U.S. goods with tariffs of 34 percent to match duties imposed on Chinese goods. ........... China has been trying for months to engage in high-level talks with the Trump administration in preparation for a potential summit between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. But Beijing has struggled to receive much of a response from the White House despite Mr. Trump saying earlier this year that he was open to engaging with Mr. Xi. ............. China “did not close the door for negotiations,” but that it would also prepare for the worst. It said the looming crisis would compel China to continue reforming its economy to rely more on its vast domestic market. ............ “The United States is shooting itself in the foot by tariffs, so we should not shoot ourselves in the foot as well,” wrote the researcher, He Bin, who was deputy director of the academy’s Center for Public Policy Research. “The correct countermeasure is to implement unilateral zero tariffs on imports from all countries.” ............. Then, on Sunday, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences announced that it was shutting down the center where Mr. He worked. It did not give a reason for the closure but cited internal regulations around the management of research centers. Those regulations state that centers, among other things, “must adhere to the correct political direction.” .............. “Resolutely support the spirit of the central government’s directive!” wrote a military blogger with 4 million followers on Weibo.

EU prefers negotiation on US tariffs, but readies first retaliation Trump's top trade adviser on Monday dismissed tech-billionaire Elon Musk's push for "zero tariffs" between the U.S. and Europe, calling the Tesla CEO a "car assembler" reliant on parts from other countries ........ "The stock markets are already collapsing and the damage could become even greater ... America is in a position of weakness"

China calls US tariffs 'bullying', urged others to continue with consultation The tariffs are "typical unilateralism and protectionism, and economic bullying" ....... U.S. tariffs in the name of reciprocity only served its own interest at the expense of other countries........... "The abuse of tariffs by the United States is tantamount to depriving countries, especially those in the Global South, of their right to development," Lin said, citing a widening gap between the rich and poor in each country, and less developed countries suffering a greater impact. .......... urged countries to jointly oppose all forms of unilateralism and protectionism, and safeguard the international system and the multilateral trading system according to the United Nations and World Trade Organization values

‘The Tsunami Is Coming’: China’s Global Exports Are Just Getting Started A staggering $1.9 trillion in extra industrial lending is fueling a continued flood of exports that could be spread even wider across the world by the Trump tariffs. .......... For decades, the world’s largest car factory was Volkswagen’s complex in Wolfsburg, Germany. But BYD, the Chinese electric carmaker, is building two factories in China, each capable of producing twice as many cars as Wolfsburg........ state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation. ......... China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe. ........... Chinese leaders are furious at the recent proliferation of trade barriers, and particularly Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs. They take pride in China’s high savings rate, long work hours and abundance of engineers and software programmers, as well as its legions of electricians, welders, mechanics, construction workers and other skilled tradesmen. ......... “It is using tariffs to subvert the existing international economic and trade order” so as “to serve the hegemonic interests of the United States.” .......... Five years ago, before a housing bubble burst, cranes putting up apartment towers dotted practically every city in China. Today, many of those cranes are gone and the ones that are left seldom move. At Beijing’s behest, banks have rapidly shifted their lending from real estate to industry. .......... China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined, and most of them are made in China by Chinese companies ........ Lending by state banks is also financing a boom in corporate research and development. Huawei, a conglomerate making items as varied as smartphones and auto parts, has just opened in Shanghai a research center for 35,000 engineers that has 10 times as much space for offices and labs as Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. ............. Leaders around the world are struggling to decide whether to raise trade barriers to protect what is left of their countries’ industrial sectors. ..........

China’s factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.

.......... Chinese companies still sell almost no cars in the United States. That is unlikely to change: With Mr. Trump’s latest moves, Chinese carmakers now face U.S. tariffs as high as 181 percent. ........... In Mexico, Chinese carmakers held just 0.3 percent in 2017; by last year, it was over 20 percent. ......... China is not just building car factories. It has built more petrochemical refinery capacity in the past five years, for example, than Europe, Japan and South Korea together have created since World War II. And China is on track to build these refineries even faster this year. Petrochemicals are then turned into plastics, polyester, vinyl and tires. ........... Robert E. Lighthizer, who was the United States trade representative in Mr. Trump’s first term, said that the latest American tariffs “are long overdue medicine — the real root cause is decades of Chinese industrial policy that has created breathtaking overcapacity and global imbalances.” .............. China is exporting so much partly because its own people are buying so little.

A housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.

............ Some Chinese economists have recently joined Western economists in suggesting that the country needs to strengthen its meager social safety net. At the start of this year, the minimum government pension for seniors was just $17 a month. That barely buys groceries, even in rural China. ............ The country’s best-known economist, Professor Li Daokui of Tsinghua University, publicly called in January for raising the minimum monthly pension several fold, to $110. The Chinese government could afford it, he argued, and extra spending by seniors would stimulate the entire economy. ......... Chinese officials rejected his advice. When the budget came out on March 5, it had an increase in monthly pensions — but it was just $3, bringing them to $20 a month.



There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness

President Trump’s imposition of high tariffs on friend and foe alike has stunned the world and stumped economists. There is no economic rationale, experts say, for believing these tariffs will usher in a new era of American prosperity.

............ the Mar-a-Lago Accord. Apparently devised by Mr. Trump and two of his top economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. This devaluation, the theory goes, would make U.S. exports more competitive, put economic pressure on China and increase manufacturing in the United States. ........... There is genuine economic, social and political discontent driving this plan. Given the demise of U.S. manufacturing and the post-Cold War development of a technologically interconnected world shaped by new geopolitical rivalries, some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States. .......... But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing,

it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea

. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great. ............. in the 1980s, after Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, implemented high interest rates to fight inflation, the dollar became irresistible to foreign governments and private investors alike. Foreign capital poured into the United States. ........... The result was a strong dollar — too strong. American-made goods became some of the most expensive in the world, creating a large trade deficit and accelerating the flight of manufacturing from the United States. ............ In the decades since, the dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency. Today, gold and oil are demarcated in dollars, facilitating global trade; foreign nations hold U.S. Treasury bonds in their official accounts as a store of value, a hedge against uncertainty and a way to stabilize their currencies............. To many, the strong dollar grants the United States “exorbitant privilege,” as a French finance minister once griped, cementing U.S. diplomatic, military and cultural dominance. To lose this status would be a doom scenario, potentially leading the United States to default on its debt and plunging the country into economic catastrophe and social collapse. ........... What the Trump administration is arguing, in effect, is that the doom scenario is already here: We have an America where manufacturing has declined, economic inequality has spread and a nation overburdened with debt pays for the military protection of its allies.

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Sunday, April 06, 2025

6: Tariff And Trade

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6: Tariff

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Saturday, April 05, 2025

6: Trump's Tariffs

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Friday, April 04, 2025

4: Tariff Chaos



Donald Trump's Approval Rating Falls to New Low With Republican Pollster
US Jobs Growth Explodes in Major Win For Trump





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Thursday, April 03, 2025

3: Tariff, Trade

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3: Tariff, Trade, And Trump

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025

12: Fitness Dad

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12: Trade

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Monday, October 13, 2014

Trade Agreements Bring Peace

English: Red
English: Red (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


India and Pakistan, take heed.

Network Theory Reveals The Hidden Link Between Trade And Military Alliances That Leads to Conflict-Free Stability
There was a time when historians focused largely on events as the be all and end all of history. But in recent years, there has been a growing understanding that a complex network of links, alliances, trade agreements and so on play a hugely important role in creating an environment in which conflict (or peace) can spread. ..... “The pressure to economize on alliances conflicts with stability against the formation of new alliances, which leads to instability and would suggest chaotic dynamics,” they say. “This instability provides insights into the constantly shifting structures and recurring wars that occurred throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.” ...... Between 1820 and 1959, there were 10 times as many wars per year on average between each possible pair of countries than between 1960 and 2000 ..... it is the formation of trade links between countries that has created the stability that has prevented wars. ..... there has been a rapid increase in global trade since World War II, not least because of the advent of container shipping in the 1960s. ..... trade provides a reason to maintain an alliance .... these economic considerations reduce the incentive to attack another country since trade will be disrupted ......... a rich family of stable networks ...... the initiating event is a poor predictor of the eventual size of an epidemic, fashion or war.

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