(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Lots to Like in Biden’s (Trump-y) China Trade Policy Vision

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allies, Biden, Biden administration, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, CPTPP, decoupling, Donald Trump, economics, economists, exports, Katherine Tai, managed trade, multilateralism, multinational companies, Phase One, tariffs, U.S. Trade Representative, USTR, Wall Street, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Despite my strong interest in U.S.-China trade issues, I’d originally decided not to post on chief U.S. trade official Katherine Tai’s Monday speech on the Biden administration’s strategy for these challenges for two main reasons. One, her remarks were widely (and reasonably well) covered by major news organizations; and two, the big news they revealed was, as expected (including by me), making clear that the Trump administration’s sweeping and often steep tariffs on Chinese goods would remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Since then, however, the think tank that hosted the event (the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies) has posted not only her presentation as delivered, but the transcript of a lengthy Q&A session that followed. And those exchanges, along with passages from her speech that have received little attention, shed lots of new light on a great many other significantly promising points about the Biden China trade approach that Tai only touched on in her speech, and one-and-a-half points that are still worrisome.

The grounds for encouragement?

First, Tai made an especially forceful and pointed argument that the pre-Trump China trade and broader economic policies (which Biden strongly supported as a Senator and as Barack Obama’s Vice President) had been a major failure. In her prepared text’s words, “For too long, China’s lack of adherence to global trading norms has undercut the prosperity of Americans and others around the world.”

In addition, China’s predatory policies (my term, not hers)

“have reinforced a zero-sum dynamic in the world economy where China’s growth and prosperity come at the expense of workers and economic opportunity here in the U.S. and other market-based democratic economies. And that is why we need to take a new, holistic, and pragmatic approach in our relationship with China that can actually further our strategic and economic objectives for the near term and the long term.”

In other words, after decades of promises and hopes that commerce between the two countries would become a winning proposition for both (as mainstream economists also insisted), the Biden administration has officially declared such interactions to have been win-lose – with the United States and especially its workers the losers.

Indeed, Tai wasn’t even close to being finished horrifying the economic mainstream or the corporate China Lobby. She pointedly refused to call Trump’s January, 2020 Phase One trade deal a “failure,” and declared that even though it “did not meaningfully address the fundamental concerns that we have with China’s trade practices and their harmful impacts on the U.S. economy,” it ”is useful and has had value in stabilizing the relationship.”

In addition, going forward, Tai told her audience that more trade Trump-ism was likely. She indicated that the administration might approve a new Trump-like initiative to impose new tariffs to enforce Phase One more effectively. She also poured decidedly cool water on the idea that the President would move to join a Pacific Basin trade deal (now called the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” or CPTPP) touted as a means of containing China, but nixed by Trump partly because its rules created wide open backdoors for goods with lots of China content.

More broadly, Tai signalled that the United States was now perfectly fine with dispensing with free trade orthodoxy in practice much of the time in favor of “managed trade” – which a questioner defined correctly as “governments setting targets [for exports and imports] and trying to achieve them” and which was embodied in China’s Phase One commitments (not yet satisfied) to boost buys of U.S. imports. ‘

Tai depicted such arrangements as having “evolved out of a frustration with the previous model. [which she described as “let’s seek market access and then, you know, let the chips fall where they may.”] And so the question that I bring to this issue that you’ve presented is not ideologically how do I feel about it, but what is actually going to present results and what is actually going to be effective.”

And she plainly portrayed them in a much more favorable light than the notion of relying on the World Trade Organization (WTO), which trade policy traditionalists have fetishized as the globe’s best hope for creating an international trade system that promoted free and fair competition through a set of detailed rules and regulations, along with a supposedly impartial legal system for resolving disputes.

In Tai’s words, however, “We brought 27 cases against China, including some I litigated myself, and through collaboration with our allies. We secured victories in every case that was decided. Still, even when China changed the specific practices we challenged, it did not change the underlying policies, and meaningful reforms by China remained elusive.”

As a result, Tai said, “as much as we will continue to invest and commit and try to innovate in terms of being a member at the WTO and seeking to bring reform to the WTO…we also need to be agile and to be open-minded and to think outside of the box with respect to how we can be more effective in addressing the concerns that we really have been struggling to address with China on trade.”

In addition,Tai also surely shocked her audience (and yours truly – pleasantly) by openly questioning the decades-long bipartisan push to increase U.S. exports to China:

“I think that part of the story of the U.S.-China trade relationship over these recent few decades has been about this thirst on the part of our business sector in particular for increased market access to China. In business sector I include our agriculture sector, obviously. You know, I think along the traditional lines of the way we’ve thought about trade and how benefits come from trade, it has been very focused on securing market access. I think that what we’ve seen is our traditional approach to trade has run into a lot of realities that are today causing us to open our eyes and think about, is what we’re looking for more liberalized trade and just more trade or are we looking for smarter and more resilient trade?”

With China facing mounting economic troubles due largely to its Ponzi-like real estate housing system and a stagnating population, that’s a valuable warning for American producers who still expect China to keep growing spectacularly and to offer gigantic, ever-expanding new markets for their goods and services.

Nonetheless, Tai specified that the Biden administration isn’t on board with widespread calls to decouple America’s economy from China’s:

“I think that the concern, maybe the question is whether or not the United States and China need to stop trading with each other. I don’t think that’s a realistic outcome in terms of our global economy. I think that the issue perhaps is, what are the goals we’re looking for in a kind of re-coupling? How can we have a trade relationship with China where we are occupying strong and robust positions within the supply chain and that there is a trade that’s happening as opposed to a dependency?”

I understand Tai’s reluctance to embrace decoupling openly. It runs too great a risk of making life in China for U.S. companies doing entirely ordinary, unobjectionable business there even harder than it’s already become, especially lately. But the reference to “re-coupling” struck me as totally unnecessary – and as unrealistic as the notion that Washington is skilled enough to preserve just as many connections to make sure that bilateral commerce does serve mutual legitimate interests, but not so many as to maintain or worsen dangerous dependencies on China, or increase its economic and technological power.

And Tai’s speech lauded the Biden aim of dealing with the China economic and technology challenges in concert with U.S. allies way too enthusiastically. As I’ve written, my prime worry has always been that priotizing this kind of multilateral approach will force the US to accept lowest-common-denominator measures that will always be sorely inadequate because so many of these allies depend so heavily on trading with and investing in China.

Nevertheless, Tai declared that “vitally, we will work closely with our allies and likeminded partners towards building truly fair international trade that enables healthy competition,” and even called this approach “the core of our strategy” on China and trade generally.

As I’ve written, U.S. Trade Representatives are rarely the last word on trade policy. So whatever Tai’s just said, I’m still not ruling out the possibility that the President will use some pretext (promises of climate change progress?) to bring back the bad old days. Certainly, that’s what Wall Street and multinational businesses want. But these Tai observations have made such a U-turn much more difficult politically. And if you agree with my cynical view that politics (mainly due to growing American public hostility toward China) and not principle is what’s produced Mr. Biden’s unexpectedly Trumpy positions toward the People’s Republic, that ain’t bean bag.

Im-Politic: Why China’s U.S. Election Interference is a Very Big Deal

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battleground states, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, Chinese Americans, collusion, Democrats, election 2020, elections, entertainment, Freedom House, Hollywood, Hoover Institution, Im-Politic, Mike Pence, multinational companies, Nancy Pelosi, National Basketball Association, NBA, Robert Draper, Robert O'Brien, social media, The New York Times Magazine, think tanks, Trump, Trump-Russia, Wall Street

It’s baaaaaaack! The Russia collusion thing, I mean. Only this time, with an important difference.

On top of charges that Moscow is monkeying around with November’s U.S. elections to ensure a Trump victory, and that the President and his aides are doing nothing to fend of this threat to the integrity of the nation’s politics, Democrats and their supporters are now dismissing claims administration about Chinese meddling as alarmism at best and diversionary at worst.

In the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, commenting on recent testimony from U.S. intelligence officials spotlighting both countries’ efforts, to “give some equivalence” of China and Russia on interference efforts “doesn’t really tell the story. 

She continued, “The Chinese, they said, prefer [presumptive Democratic nominee Joe] Biden — we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election.” ,

The Mainstream Media, as is so often the case, echoed this Democratic talking point. According to The New York Times‘ Robert Draper (author most recently of a long piece in the paper’s magazine section on Mr. Trump’s supposed refusal to approve anti-Russia interference measures or take seriously such findings by the intelligence community ), China “is really not able to affect the integrity of our electoral system the way Russia can….”

And I use the term “Democratic talking point” for two main reasons. First, the Chinese unquestionably have recently gotten into the explicit election meddling game – though with some distinctive Chinese characteristics. Second, and much more important, China for decades has been massively influencing American politics more broadly in ways Russia can’t even dream about – mainly because so many major national American institutions have become so beholden to the Chinese government for so long thanks to the decades-long pre-Trump policy of promoting closer bilateral ties.

As for the narrower, more direct kind of election corrupting, you don’t need to take the word of President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien that “China, like Russia and Iran, have engaged in cyberattacks and fishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure and with respect to websites.”

Nor do you have to take the word of Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2018 cited a national intelligence assessment that found that China “ is targeting U.S. state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy. It’s using wedge issues, like trade tariffs, to advance Beijing’s political influence.”

You can ignore Pence’s contention that that same year, a document circulated by Beijing stated that China must [quoting directly] “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States.

You can even write off China’s decision at the height of that fall’s Congressional election campaigns to take out a “four-page supplement in the Sunday Des Moines [Iowa] Register” that clearly was “intended to undermine farm-country support for President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war….”

Much harder to ignore, though: the claim made last year by a major Hoover Institution study that

“In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections.”

Don’t forget, moreover, findings that Chinese trolls are increasingly active on major social media platforms. According to a report from the research institute Freedom House:

“[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are…apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google’s search engine Reddit,and YouTube.”

The Hoover report also came up with especially disturbing findings about Beijing’s efforts to influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:

“Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland.

In addition:

“In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chineselanguage outlets and established its own new outlets.”

Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American super-category thats been the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible voters in the country.

Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where the many of the 2016 presidential election margins were razor thin, of which look up for grabs this year, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

As for the second, broader and indirect, Chinese meddling in American politics, recall these developments, many of which have been documented on RealityChek:

>U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as long carried Beijing’s water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S. political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn’t sent many U.S. operations overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese market.

>These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks – which garb their special interest agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship. By the way, at least one of these think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has taken Chinese government money, too.

>Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown nose China in search of profits that it’s made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material deemed offensive to China. And in case you haven’t noticed, show biz figures haven’t exactly been reluctant to weigh in on U.S. political issues lately. And yes, that includes the stars of the National Basketball Association, who have taken a leading role in what’s become known as the Black Lives Matter movement, but who have remained conspicuously silent about the lives of inhabitants of the vast China market that’s one of their biggest and most promising cash cows.

However indirect this Chinese involvement in American politics is, its effects clearly dwarf total Russian efforts – and by orders of magnitude. Nor is there any reason to believe that Moscow is closing the gap. In fact, China’s advantage here is so great that it makes a case for a useful rule-of-thumb:  Whenever you find out about someone complaining about Russia’s election interference but brushing off China’s, you can be sure that they’re not really angry about interference as such. They’re just angry about interference they don’t like.`      

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Evidence that the Multinationals Really Did Sell the U.S. Out to China

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capital spending, chemicals, China, computers, electronics, health security, healthcare goods, information technology, investment, Lenin, manufacturing, multinational companies, national security, offshoring, offshoring lobby, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pharmaceuticals, research and development, supply chains, tech, tech transfer, U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission, USCC, World Trade Organization, WTO

RealityChek readers and anyone who’s familiar with my work over many years know that I’ve often lambasted U.S. multinational companies for powerfully aiding and abetting China’s rise to the status of economic great power status – and of surging threat to U.S. national security and prosperity. In fact, the dangers posed by China’s activities and goals have become so obvious that even the American political and policy establishments that on the whole actively supported the policies – and that permitted money from this corporate Offshoring Lobby to drive their decisions – are paying attention.

If you still doubt how these big U.S. corporations have sold China much of the rope with which it’s determined to hang their own companies and all of America (paraphrasing Lenin’s vivid supposed description of and prediction about the perilously shortsighted greed of capitalists), you should check out the latest report of the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). As made clear by this study from an organization set up by Congress to monitor the China threat, not only have the multinationals’ investments in China figured “prominently in China’s national development ambitions.” They also “may indirectly erode the United States’ domestic industrial competitiveness and technological leadership relative to China.”

Worst of all, “as U.S. MNE (“multinational enterprise) activity in China increasingly focuses on the production of high-end technologies, the risk that U.S. firms are unwittingly enabling China to achieve its industrial policy and military development objectives rises.”

And a special bonus – these companies’ offshoring has greatly increased America’s dependence on China for supplies of crucial healthcare goods.

Here’s just a sampling of the evidence presented (and taken directly by the Commission from U.S. government reports):

> U.S. multinationals “employ more people in China than in any other country outside of the United States, primarily in the assembly of computers and electronic products.” Moreover, this employment skyrocketed by 574.6 percent from 2000 to 2017.

> “China is the fourth-largest destination for U.S. MNE research and development (R&D) expenditure and increasingly competes with advanced economies in serving as a key research hub for U.S. MNEs. The growth of U.S. MNE R&D expenditure in China is also comparatively accelerated, averaging 13.6 percent yearon-year since 2003 compared with 7.1 percent for all U.S. MNE foreign affiliates in the same period. This expenditure is highest in manufacturing, particularly in the production of computers and electronic products.”

> “U.S. MNE capital expenditure in China has focused on the creation of production sites for technology products. This development is aided by the Chinese government’s extensive policy support to develop China.”

> The multinationals’ capital spending on semiconductor manufacturing assets “has jumped 166.7 percent from $1.2 billion in 2010 (the earliest year for which complete [U.S government] data is available) to $3.2 billion in 2017, accounting for 90 percent of all U.S. MNE expenditure on computers and electronic products manufacturing assets in China.”

> “China has grown from the 20th-highest source of U.S. MNE affiliate value added in 2000 ($5.5 billion) to the fifth highest in 2017 ($71.5 billion), driven primarily by the manufacture of computers and electronic products as well as chemicals. The surge is especially notable in semiconductors and other electronic components.”

> “[P]harmaceutical manufacturing serves as the largest chemical sector in terms of value-added [a measure of manufacturing output that seeks to eliminate double-counting of output by stripping out the contribution of intermediate goods used in final products]…” And chemicals – the manufacturing category that include pharmaceuticals – has become the second largest U.S-owned industry in China measured by the value of its assets (after computers and electronic products).

Incidentally, the report’s tendency to use 2000 as a baseline year for examining trends is no accident. That’s the year before China was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and the numbers strongly reenforce the argument that the multinationals so avidly sought this objective in order to make sure that the value of their huge planned investments in China wouldn’t be kneecapped by any unilateral U.S. tariffs on imports from China (including those from their factories). For the WTO’s combination of consensus decision-making plus the protectionist natures of most of its members’ economies created a towering obstacle to Washington acting on its own to safeguard legitimate American domestic economic interests from Chinese and other foreign predatory trade and broader economic activity.

At the same time, despite the WTO’s key role in preserving the value of the multinationals’ export-focused China investments, the USCC study underestimates how notably such investment remains geared toward exporting, including to the United States. This issue matters greatly because chances are high that this kind of investment (in China or anywhere else abroad) has replaced the multinationals’ factories and workers in the United States. By contrast, multinational investment in China (or anywhere else abroad) that’s supplying the China market almost never harms the U.S. domestic economy and in fact can help it, certainly in early stages, by providing foreign customers that add to the domestic customers of U.S.-based manufacturers.

There’s no doubt that the phenomenal growth of China’s own consumer class in recent decades has, as the China Commission report observes, generated more and more American business decisions to supply those customers from China. In other words, the days when critical masses of Chinese couldn’t possibly afford to buy the goods they made in U.S.- and other foreign-owned factories are long gone.

But the data presented by the USCC does nothing to support this claim, and the key to understanding why is the central role played by computer, electronics, and other information technology-related manufacturing in the U.S. corporate presence in China. For when the Commission (and others) report that large shares of the output of these factories are now sold to Chinese customers, they overlook the fact that many of these other customers are their fellow entities comprising links of China-centric corporate supply chains. These sales, however, don’t mean that the final customers for these products are located in China.

In other words, when a facility in China that, for example, performs final assembly activities on semiconductors sells those chips to another factory in China that sticks them into computers or cell phones or HDTV sets, the sale is regarded as one made to a Chinese customer. But that customer in turn surely sells much of its own production overseas. As the USCC documents, China’s consumer market for these goods has grown tremendously, too. But China’s continually surging share of total global production of these electronics products (also documented in the Commission report) indicates that lots of this output continues to be sold overseas.

Also overlooked by the USCC – two other disturbing apects of the multinationals’ activities in China.

First, it fails to mention that all the computer and electronics-related investment in China – which presumably includes a great deal of software-related investment – has contributed to China’s economic and military ambitions not only by transferring knowhow to Chinese partners, but by teaching huge numbers of Chinese science and technology workers how to generate their technology advances. The companies’ own (often glowing) descriptions of these training activities – which have often taken the form of dedicated training programs and academies – were revealed in this 2013 article of mine.

Second, the Commission’s report doesn’t seem to include U.S. multinationals’ growing investments not simply in high tech facilities in China that they partly or wholly own, but in Chinese-owned entities. As I’ve reported here on RealityChek, these capital flows are helping China develop and produce high tech goods with numerous critical defense-related applications, and the scale has grown so large that some elements of the U.S. national security community had been taking notice as early as 2015. And President Trump seems to be just as oblivious to these investments as globalist former President Barack Obama was.

These criticisms aside, though, the USCC has performed a major public service with this survey of the multinationals’ China activities. It should be must reading in particular for anyone who still believes that these companies – whose China operations have so greatly enriched and therefore strengthened the People’s Republic at America’s expense – deserve much influence over the U.S. China policy debate going forward.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The New York Fed’s Unseemly Rush to Judgment on Trump’s China Tariffs

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Breitbart.com, China, consumers, deadweight loss, importers, John Carney, multinational companies, New York Fed, supply chain, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

When a senior researcher from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve System and two academic colleagues came out in May with a blog post on the Bank’s website reporting on who really pays the cost of President Trump’s tariffs on huge amounts of U.S. imports from China, they were hardly short of confidence in their answer. And Mr. Trump’s critics eagerly jumped on the emphatic contention that the main victims of the China trade war would be American households, who would get hit with a triple whammy.

Higher consumer prices could result from (1) the levies themselves simply being on to American customers by importers, (2) businesses switching from selling Chinese products to selling more expensive but non-tariff-ed foreign counterparts, and (3) businesses substituting more expensive domestic counterparts for the tariff-ed Chinese goods.

John Carney of Breitbart.com has both done a terrific job of explaining the gaping holes and other flaws in that first New York Fed post (in this piece about the longer work on which it was based), and of reporting that yesterday, the Bank published a follow-on post (by a different team of authors but also bearing the imprimateur of the New York Fed’s Research and Statistics Group) implicitly admitting many of the initial effort’s weaknesses.

Rather than me reproducing or summarizing John’s work (which you can read at the above links), I’d like to try adding some value – by using it and the New York Fed’s own material to show what an unseemly rush to judgment the initial study represented in a clear effort to slime the Trump tariff policies.

Here’s the unequivocal conclusion of that first New York Fed post:

“Studies, including our own, have found that the tariffs that the United States imposed in 2018 have had complete passthrough into domestic prices of imports, which means that Chinese exporters did not reduce their prices. Hence, U.S. domestic prices at the border have risen one for-one with the tariffs levied in that year. Our study also found that a 10 percent tariff reduced import demand by 43 percent. ”

On top of these come the losses of businesses switching to non-Chinese suppliers. This supply chain reorganization produces what economists call “deadweight losses” and these New York Fed authors insisted that they arise “regardless of whether consumers switch to more expensive foreign sources or to a more expensive domestic source.”

The total damage to American households, according to the study? An impressive $831 for each American household each year. So much for President Trump’s claim that his trade war is only hurting China, right?

Well, as a used-car company ad has famously said, “Not exactly.” And the evidence comes from the second New York Fed post – which makes clear just how many uncertainties the first team needed to ignore in order to generate its headline-grabbing claim. Among them:

>”Who pays the tariff tax depends on how it is split between lower profit margins (for wholesalers, retailers, and manufacturers) and higher prices for consumers. Estimating this split is difficult since the distribution of any tax increase on profit margins and prices depends on the details of market structure, such as the number and size of competing firms.”

>”Policy efforts since World War II have been focused on lowering trade barriers. As a result, economists don’t have much data from which to glean insights into how firms respond to tariff hikes.”

>”Affiliates of multinational corporations may be leaving reported import prices unchanged for accounting reasons. In doing so, the multinational would be letting higher tariffs reduce the reported profits of its U.S. operation (rather than those of its Chinese operation).”

These cautionary notes are all entirely valid, but they add up to confessing that economists – including at the New York Fed – don’t have much basis for drawing any firm conclusions about the China tariffs’ impact on American consumers at all. As a result, they raise questions about why the first team never mentioned them, and why no one else at the Bank seems to have brought them up before posting, either.

Just as important, the second New York Fed post mentions several major ways in which China’s economy is taking major body blows from the trade war:

>Chinese entities with narrow profit margins may not be able to lower them further in order to prevent the prices they charge from increasing due to U.S. tariffs, and therefore “may be dropping out of the U.S. market.”

>Many Chinese entities have taken advantage of the post-tariff devaluation of China’s currency and have been able to accept this “loss in competitiveness” in the U.S. market by padding profits on their sales – which should strike everyone as awfully gimmicky.  (The latter point is my own conclusion.)

>China has indeed lost market share in the United States, including in sectors that the Chinese government has sought at great expense to promote – like machinery and electronics.

Because the New York Fed is, well, the New York Fed, and its studies are supposed to represent the gold standard of economic research, Googling that first study with “‘New York Fed’ China tariffs consumers May” produces some 79,000 results. It’s true that some of these mention the second study, too – and even note the costs to China. But I can’t help but share Carney’s concern that the first report’s troubling shortcomings won’t attract remotely as much attention.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why the Multinationals Still Should be Ignored on China

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Bloomberg.com, China, multinational companies, multinationals, offshoring, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Is China mainly valued by American multinational businesses as a super-cheap production site for serving U.S. customers, or as a huge and potentially huge-er consumer market? The question has mattered decisively since the beginning of the nation’s controversial and dramatic trade expansion with China because of the impact on domestic U.S. jobs and production.

So it’s important to report that a new poll of the multinationals that operate in the People’s Republic strongly supports the views of trade policy critics (like me) who have charged that the nation’s pre-Trump approach to China’s economic rise has produced America Last results for the United States, and have urged a fundamentally new strategy.

If the multinationals were using China mainly to supply the U.S. market, as the critics have long insisted, then the trade and investment patterns that have emerged with China would inevitably be undercutting America’s economy. For their investment in the People’s Republic would be mainly replacing factories and similar facilities in the United States, and even exports to China would mainly be replacing shipments between plants within the United States.

If, however, these global giants (and the economists they employ to make their case to politicians, the press, and the public) were right in claiming that their activities were mainly focused on satisfying demand in China, and especially final demand, then the U.S. domestic economy would benefit. For their new Chinese customers would be supplementing their existing American customers, and overall markets for products Made in the USA would grow. (See here and here for arguments from multinationals-funded think tanks studies purporting to document that this win-win scenario has been the case for years.)

But a survey conducted by no less than the American Chamber of Commerce in China and by its Shanghai branch makes clear the great extent to which U.S.-owned businesses operating in China are oriented towards customers back home. One of the biggest hints? More (40 percent) of the 239 firms contacted said that (in the words of a Bloomberg.com summary) “the hike of U.S. tariffs announced on May 10 would have a strong negative impact on their business” than said that they would be hurt by a retaliatory Chinese increase in its duties (33 percent). Clearly, the American levies’ increase would damage those companies because of all that they produce in China for export to the United States. And this despite the robust growth of a Chinese consuming class that is said to be the main reason for concentrating on Chinese customer.

Two other big clues: Fully 35 percent of the companies responding said that “their main strategy for dealing with the tension was to restructure so their operations were more heavily ‘in China for China.’” In other words, many of their China operations are still structured to be “in China for somewhere else.” And 53 percent of the businesses reported that they faced no non-tariff retaliatory measures from Beijing since July, 2018 – when the first Trump China tariffs were announced. Why would they if much of their focus was exporting, and thereby helping China earn valuable foreign exchange revenue?

Nonetheless, the American Chamber survey did turn up two semi-surprises. First, only one of the companies responding complained that a curb on China’s forced technology transfer practices “was the most important outcome” for President Trump to achieve in any trade agreement. For decades, reports of this practice have been too numerous to list.

Second, 42 percent of the companies stated that “a return to the status quo before the tariffs was most important for them” – even though mounting corporate complaints about harassment from and discrimination by the Chinese government and its agents in the Chinese “business” sector are mains reason for strong (stated, anyway) bipartisan American support for ramping up the pressure on China. At the same time, this result could be yet another sign of how much U.S. corporate activity in China continues using the country mainly as an export platform.

Even the most charitable interpretation of this survey would conclude that American businesses simply have no coherent idea of what they want U.S. China trade diplomacy to produce. On the one hand, many of them plainly remain unhappy with the Chinese environment in which they operate. On the other, many plainly oppose the only American measures – tariffs – with any hope of improving this environment.

All of which tells me that, although there may be many grounds for criticizing President Trump’s trade war with China, opposition from an American business community that is at best utterly clueless and at worst hopelessly conflicted on the issues isn’t one of them.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Mainstream U.S. Trade Policy’s Main Rationale Has Just Been Blown Up

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Bill Clinton, BRICS, China, emerging markets, EMs, Financial Times, globalization, Jim O'Neill, multinational companies, offshoring, Project-Syndicate.org, Sherrod Brown, The Race to the Bottom, Trade, trade agreements, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m always struck by how often in the news media or policy writing (e.g., in journals like Foreign Affairs), genuinely game-changing points are made in passing, and for folks with any interest in the trade and globalization issues raised to such prominence by President Trump. And two such instances dealing with this subject just came in the Financial Times newspaper and the website Project-Syndicate.org.

The observation they both made with mind-boggling offhandedness – economic growth in countries dubbed “emerging markets” (EMs) is slowing to rates no faster than those of the rest of the world, and thus rendering them incapable as far as the eye can see of replacing the United States as a global growth engine.

This claim matters decisively for trade policy because these EMs have dominated America’s approach in this field for more than two decades. First identified in the early 1990s, they consist of economies in the developing world that not only boasted enormous populations. But largely because communism and a heavy state role in economic policy had been so thoroughly discredited due to the end of the Cold War, they were steadily transitioning to more free market approaches, and thus were seen to have huge growth potential. China and Mexico were the leading examples, but various definitions of the main emerging markets also included India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and others.

According to trade enthusiasts, this combination of characteristics was going to make the EMs so important that accessing their vast current consumer markets and even greater consuming and importing potential needed to be Washington’s top trade priority. Their significance was portrayed as all the more important given America’s status as a “maturing” economy whose growth was bound to continue slowing. (Former President Bill Clinton used exactly this term while advocating for an emerging markets push in a document that’s not on-line but that’s cited in my book on globalization, The Race to the Bottom. The document was the 1995 Report of the President of the United States on the Trade Agreements Program and it was published by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at the start of 1996.)    

Yet however impressive and promising they seemed, the idea was a crock from the beginning – at least in terms of its importance in driving American trade policy for the foreseeable future. EM cheerleading suffered two fatal flaws. First, despite rapid growth and immense growth potential, the emerging markets were starting from such low bases – especially in terms of their populations’ consuming power – that they wouldn’t become significant markets in absolute terms for many years at best. Second, precisely because they remained so poor and under-developed, their governments invariably realized that their own best growth opportunities came from exporting to much wealthier countries like the United States – where the needed consumption power already existed.

So why the EMs euphoria? As documented exhaustively in The Race to the Bottom, the multinational corporations that dominated American trade policy-making never saw the emerging markets as final consumption markets. They viewed them as super low-cost production bases from which they could supply the U.S. market much more profitably than possible from their domestic factories. Which is exactly why, starting with the pursuit of trade expansion with Mexico at the onset of the 1990s, American trade policy almost exclusively targeted the emerging markets and other very low-income countries (like Vietnam and the countries of Central America) for negotiating new trade deals.

Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (a possible 2020 Democratic presidential contender) described the multinationals sales pitch to leading EM China somewhat too charitably when he said in 2015, “while walking the halls of Congress, [lobbyists for the multinationals] talked about they wanted access to 1 billion Chinese customers. What they didn’t say is they also wanted access to 1 billion potential Chinese workers.”

As The Race to the Bottom also made clear, EM touting was star-crossed from the start – even embarrassingly so. As it peaked, in the mid-1990s, many of these same countries started experiencing problems that led to major financial crises even before the decade ended. That is, their markets became evaporating, not emerging, and in numerous cases they kept afloat only by cheapening their currencies, limiting their own consumption and importing still further, and making them more powerful exporters than ever.

Yet the multinationals’ power and influence remained so decisive throughout America’s political (and media) establishment that emerging markets hucksterism continued to justify trade agreements with such countries. Hence the continued repetition of wholly misleading contentions like “95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States” (which I debunked here).

So that’s why I was so interested to see the following in a Financial Times blog post – and by no less than a former senior official at the International Monetary Fund and another leading international economic institution:  

“EM growth has slowed to about 4.5 per cent at present….In the long run, according to the OECD, the potential growth rate of the Briics (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa — accounting for most of EM GDP) is expected to slow further, converging to mature market trend growth of 2 per cent. In other words, the growth advantage of more than 4 percentage points that EMs enjoyed over mature markets in the 2000-2010 period has narrowed to about 2 percentage points and will probably disappear in the long run.”

And guess what? Unlike in the United States, in particular, even much of this EM growth will rely on maximizing exports and minimizing imports. So their importance as markets for American-made goods and services will be even less impressive than this impeccably mainstream analyst suggests.

Equally startling: This Project-Syndicate column by Jim O’Neill. O’Neill, for the unitiated, was perhaps the highest profile EM cheerleader, and coined a popular acronym for those economies that described those he believed most promising: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

The former Goldman Sachs banker has remained a believer in China, and has actually added some countries to his list of economies he believes will loom much larger in this century. But in the column, he also argued that, if China falters in what he (wrongly, in my view) considers its role as a global growth engine, and the American consumer gets tapped out, none of the other emerging economies “is in a position to match the growth of Chinese consumption today, or even over the course of the next decade.” And by extension, the likelihood of these countries replacing the United States is even more infinitesimal.

Former French leader Charles de Gaulle once famously said that “Brazil is the country of the future…and always will be.” The two examples above show that the same solidly grounded skepticism is also finally seeping into the ranks of globalization cheerleaders. How long will it take before the American political, business, academic, and media establishments finally start paying attention?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Atlantic’s Hatchet Job on Trump’s Trade Policy and Trade Negotiator

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Chad Bown, China, globalization, James Bacchus, Matt Peterson, Merit Janow, multinational companies, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Robert Lighthizer, The Atlantic, Trade, trade war, Trump, U.S. Trade Representative, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I wish I could say that, in the process of ringing out the old year, America is ringing out incompetent or willfully ignorant journalism about U.S. trade policy. But a looooong article just published by The Atlantic on U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer makes painfully clear that that point remains as far away as ever.

The article, by Atlantic Senior Editor Matt Peterson, would deserve quick dismissal simply due to one of its major themes: that Lighthizer, President Trump’s chief trade negotiator, takes a hard line on the issue in general, and on China in particular, because he’s long been in the pocket of the domestic steel industry as one of its principal trade lawyers.

This smear is especially rich because a trade policymaker lionized by Peterson as a strong opponent of such conflicts of interest and consequent paragon of policy virtue – another American trade lawyer named Merit Janow – followed her stint as a senior magistrate at the World Trade Organization (WTO) – by accepting a position as “a charter member of the International Advisory Council of China’s sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation or CIC.” That is, she jumped onto the payroll of the Chinese government.

But more fundamentally troubling about Peterson’s piece is its – sadly, standard – description of the WTO as an institution that defends and promotes the interests of the entire American economy. How so? By creating a U.S.-style court of law that would impartially mete out commercial justice but that could be used especially effectively by American diplomats highly skilled in working with such systems. One genuine contribution made by Peterson is reporting evidence that Lighthizer himself once apparently bought into this argument.

These views, however, completely ignore two related, alternative interpretations of the WTO’s creation that at deserve consideration at least because one of them is so regularly repeated by journalists and WTO supporters. That interpretation portrays the WTO as an arrangement that aimed primarily at restraining America’s ability to combat predatory foreign trade practices by enmeshing the United States in a simple majoritarian legal system in which all countries – including the vast majority of members who relied heavily on such mercantilism for their growth.

Chad Bown of the (pro-WTO) Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the American media’s “go to” trade policy commentators made this point abundantly clear when he told The New York Times that the main foreign impetus for establishing the WTO was a determination to find ways of resisting America’s (successful) 1980s unilateral efforts to frustrate their trade predation and pry open their markets to U.S.-made goods.

Former WTO official (and U.S. Member of Congress) James Bacchus made a similar point earlier this year when he criticized Lighthizer (and other American economic nationalists) for their belief that the United States was better off under the pre-WTO world trade system.  Why?  Because it left the (democratically elected) U.S. government “free to go on the offence aggressively in trade by taking unilateral trade actions without any international legal constraint.”

The second, related alternative interpretation of the WTO’s creation focuses on the U.S. multinational corporations that dominated U.S. trade policymaking under Mr. Trump’s immediate predecessors: They strongly favored subjecting unilateral American power in trade diplomacy because their overseas operations – especially those geared toward supplying the American market – benefited immensely, often at the expense of domestic competitors, from many of the predatory foreign practices targeted by many American leaders who don’t shill for these offshoring interests. China’s longstanding beggar-its-neighbors currency policies have been only one example.

The Atlantic is rightly proud of its long history of publishing “iconic thinkers” and “covering ideas that matter.” Many more articles like Peterson’s, and it will also be known for hatchet jobs.

Im-Politic: A Left-Wing Attack on Trump Tariffs that the Offshoring Lobby Could Love

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"resistance", China, Democrats, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, liberals, multinational companies, NAFTA, Nomi Prins, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring lobby, progressives, strange bedfellows, tariffs, The Nation, Trade, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump tariffs

Although I view it as being small-minded, short-sighted, and often over-the-top, I can’t completely fault many left-of-center American trade policy critics for failing to support (and even attacking) most of President Trump’s trade policy initiatives. Not so with Nomi Prins’ new indictment in The Nation. She’s taken this dimension of Never Trump-ism and “Resistance” to a wholly new and troublingly counterproductive level,

Mr. Trump has assaulted many of the trade deals that liberals, progressives, and many Democrats themselves long resisted (like NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – and the the Trans-Pacific Partnership – TPP). And he’s dealing decisively (so far!) with many other foreign trade policy transgressions and global trade institutions they’ve long assailed (like China’s dumping of steel and aluminum and wide array of other predatory trade practices, and the World Trade Organization, or WTO).

But many on the Left (and indeed, all over American politics) are understandably disgusted with some of the President’s rhetoric and record in immigration and gender issues and race relations, and with his family’s continuing domestic and foreign business ties (including with China), which look like conflicts of interest and at the least can look hypocritical (e.g., using immigrant workers both legal and illegal). Moreover, you don’t have to be a Never-Trumper to be upset with the ties between many Trump administration appointees and industries they’re supposed to be regulating.

Moreover, the President is attacking American trade and related globalization policies from an economic nationalist/America First standpoint. Having worked with left-of-center trade critics for nearly 30 years, I can tell you that this has never been their perspective. Though this is an overly broad generalization, they have been loathe to acknowledge that what’s best for America and what’s best for the rest of the world may not be identical – especially in the short and even medium-terms. As a result, their criticisms of many long-standing U.S. trade policies have often demonstrated at least as much concern for their impact on workers in developing countries as on their counterparts in the United States.

In fact, they tend to reject the idea that the main fault-line in the global economy has been the United States (and even the U.S.’ productive economy) versus “the rest”. In the view of these left-of-center critics, the main fault line instead is between the capital holders of the world versus the workers of the world.

The point of this post is not to insist that the nationalists have been right and the progressives et al have been wrong. It is to note that Prins’ new Nation piece disturbingly edges into Trump Derangement Syndrome territory. The main reasons: Her stated problems with the administration’s trade policies aren’t based on any of the above counter-arguments. Instead, her main anti-Trump points are almost indistinguishable from those made by the establishment supporters of the trade and globalist status quo – including not only the foreign policy “Blob” that has always backed seeking geopolitical and diplomatic gains even when they come at the expense of U.S. workers and the domestic economy, but those multinational business groups comprising the “global capitalist” interests that the trade policy progressives have always targeted!

Thus we hear from Prins both that the actual and prospective Trump tariffs have angered America’s “closest allies” in the Group of 7 industrial countries of Europe and the Far East, along with “our regional partners” in NAFTA. She’s repeated the canard that the President’s trade moves scarily resemble the Hawley Smoot tariff that “sparked the global Great Depression, opening the way for the utter devastation of World War II.” She consistently portrays the world’s other major economies as genuine paragons of free trade. (Not even China is chided.)

Even more striking, the main evidence she cites for the claim that the President “is sparking a set of trade wars that could, in the end, cost millions of American jobs” comes from Offshoring Lobby pillars like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the Brookings Institution (which, not so incidentally, takes lots of money from most of the leading foreign economies that will be hit by Trump tariffs).

It’s been noted often since the NAFTA’s negotiation in the early 1990s ushered in the offshoring-happy phase of U.S. trade policy that the resulting domestic political divisions have created some “strange bedfellows” alliances – i.e., coalitions that have had little in common other than common views on this front. Will the Prins article help usher in the strangest trade bedfellow coalition yet – between the left-wing anti-Trump resistance and the Fortune 500? Such groups are singing much the same tune on issues like immigration policy, so this prospect isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Further, don’t forget that voters who consider themselves Democrats and those leaning in this direction are viewing trade in general much more favorably these days than during any other recent period – at least according to polls. (Republicans and GOP leaners have shifted in the opposite direction.) And the appearance of an article containing these arguments, and evidence drawn from corporate and corporate-funded sources, has appeared in The Nation – long one of the American Left’s flagship publications – is another ominous sign.

One reason for optimism (if you agree that U.S. trade policy needs a big-time overhaul): Many left-of-center trade policy critics have (albeit grudgingly) supported the main thrust of the President’s trade policies. Even though most still retain their “globalist loyalties,” their complaints about the administration’s approach have centered on its instances of backtracking on Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, and (like me) on apparent inconsistencies. So it will be especially interesting to see if they push back strongly, or at all, versus Prins’ views. The answer could help determine the future of the politics of American trade policy – and of the policy itself.

Making News: Back on National Radio this AM – & More!

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FoxNews.com, Gordon G. Chang, Korn Ferry Institute, Making News, manufacturing, multinational companies, Paul Viollis, Simon Constable, South Korea, taxes, The Laura Ingraham Show, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that I will be appearing on Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show this morning.  During the segment, scheduled to start at 10:15 EST, guest host Paul Viollis and I will be discussing the new tax changes and what they mean for the economy.

You can listen live on-line at this link, and as usual, I will post a podcast of the interview as soon as one is available.

In addition, this December 4 blog post on the website of the Korn Ferry Institute featured my views on the odds that manufacturing more locally is becoming a trend among multinational businesses. The Institute’s parent organization is a leading executive search and management consulting firm, and the author, Simon Constable, is a veteran business and economics journalist.

And it was great to be quoted in this November 29 FoxNews.com column by Gordon G. Chang on the future of America’s bilateral trade agreement with South Korea.

Keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developnents. And Season’s Greetings to all!

Making News: Podcast On-Line of Last Night’s Batchelor Interview on Trump & China – & More!

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Asia, China, Gordon G. Chang, IndustryToday, Making News, multinational companies, supply chains, The John Batchelor Show, Trade, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast of my interview last night on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show is now on-line. Click here to access a lively discussion among John, co-host Gordon G. Chang, and me, about the China phase of President Trump’s Asia visit.

Also, it was great to see IndustryToday.com this morning run my recent post about multinational companies’ hypocrisy when it comes to the likely effect of Trump-ian trade policies on their global supply chains. Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of media appearances and other developments.