Tag Archives: Trade

Trump Furious As Obama Administration Blocks Release Of Hillary-TPP Emails Until After Election, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton is all over the lot on trade agreements, so it would be informative if the electorate knew where she stood on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) while she was Secretary of State. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the State Department said it would release them in April. It didn’t, and now says it will not do so until after the election in November. How convenient for Waffling Hillary. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update: Donald Trump’s campaign Monday demanded that the State Department release Hillary Clinton-era government emails about a pending 12-nation trade deal that Trump says will destroy American jobs and hurt the American economy.

“Hillary Clinton’s TPP emails should absolutely be released, as her support for TPP threatens to permanently undermine U.S. workers and sovereignty,” said Trump’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, in a statement to IBT. “Hillary is 100 percent controlled by corporate interests, including foreign corporate interests, and it is essential these emails see the light of day.”

“There is zero doubt that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would enact the TPP — just like she enacted the Columbian [sic] deal and the Korean deal after claiming to oppose both,” Miller wrote in apparent reference to recently released documents about Clinton’s work on those deals as Secretary of State after she had previously pledged to oppose them during her 2008 presidential campaign.

“Hillary’s careful wording on TPP in her primary battle — that she now disapproves of it only ‘in its current form’ after months of lobbying for it — is further proof that she has every intention of ramming it down the throats of the American people, sending millions more jobs overseas. Hillary is the outsourcing candidate.”

Even CNN is stunned at The White House’s (and Hillary’s) hypocrisy…

As we detailed earlier, with Hillary Clinton unclear on her ‘real’ support for ObamaTrade, and international trade bound to be a crucial issue during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, it will likely come as no surprise to many that, as International Business Times reports, the Obama administration has now abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times’ open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

…

If IBT’s open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department’s report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary.

“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”

To continue reading: Trump Furious As Obama Administration Blocks Release Of Hillary-TPP Emails Until After Election

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‘Free Trade’ vs. Actual Free Trade, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on May 6, 2016 | Leave a comment

Why “free trade” agreements have nothing to do with actual free trade. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Trade agreements pushed by corporate elites are bogus “free trade”

The unlikely rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has focused public attention on an issue that hasn’t gotten much attention since the Civil War era – international trade.

One of the biggest controversies in nineteenth century American politics was tariffs – with Big Business manufacturers for them, and farmers and producers of other commodities against them. Corporate behemoths wanted protection from foreign competition, while ordinary consumers wanted lower prices. Furthermore, tariff revenue was used to enrich crony capitalists in the industrialized North: the federal government subsidized the building of railroads, canals, and other infrastructure, while the beneficiaries of this largesse turned cheap tariff-free commodities produced in the South and West into high-priced manufactured goods.

These days, however, the “free trade” versus “fair trade” debate is seemingly reversed, with the big corporations supposedly favoring the former while the latter is championed by leftists like Sanders and right-wing populists of the Trumpian variety. In reality, however, nothing has really changed.

It would be very easy to institute a free trade regime in the United States, and you wouldn’t need a thousand-page treaty to do it. You’d only have to abolish all tariffs, subsidies, and other government-imposed impediments to the free passage of goods across our borders. That’s free trade.

But of course other countries, not being as obliging to the wishes of their own downtrodden consumers, would not necessarily reciprocate. The native manufacturers of these countries, enjoying considerable political pull, would follow the example of our own nineteenth century corporate titans and lobby for the imposition of protective tariffs. Here in the US, our own manufacturing giants would soon raise the alarm, political pull would win out over the welfare of mere consumers, and a tariff wall would go up. This is known as a “trade war.”

Absent an international system of free trade, these trade wars are a permanent feature of global commerce. The irony is that they are now being waged in the name of ‘free trade.” A perfect example of this phenomenon is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Sanders and Trump have pointed to as the villain that decimated America’s industrial capacity and turned many sections of the country into hollowed out shells. And they are perfectly right to do so – but perfectly wrong to attack NAFTA as the epitome of free trade. As Murray Rothbard pointed out over twenty years ago:

“In truth, the bipartisan establishment’s trumpeting of ‘free trade’ since World War II fosters the opposite of genuine freedom of exchange. The establishment’s goals and tactics have been consistently those of free trade’s traditional enemy, “mercantilism” — the system imposed by the nation-states of 16th to 18th century Europe….

“Whereas genuine free traders look at free markets and trade, domestic or international, from the point of view of the consumer (that is, all of us), the mercantilist, of the 16th century or today, looks at trade from the point of view of the power elite, big business in league with the government. Genuine free traders consider exports a means of paying for imports, in the same way that goods in general are produced in order to be sold to consumers. But the mercantilists want to privilege the government-business elite at the expense of all consumers, be they domestic or foreign.

“In negotiations with Japan, for example, be they conducted by Reagan or Bush or Clinton, the point is to force Japan to buy more American products, for which the American government will graciously if reluctantly permit the Japanese to sell their products to American consumers. Imports are the price government pays to get other nations to accept our exports.”

To continue reading: ‘Free Trade’ vs. Actual Free Trade

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Chart Of The Day: German Exports Sputter Due To Sinking China Orders, By David Stockman

Posted on April 6, 2016 | Leave a comment

How about that, two charts of the day today from davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

China’s economy is now slowing, and it is buying less from Germany. Nine of Germany’s 10 biggest exports to China fell last year including cars, one of the most important industries in Germany.

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/chart-of-the-day-german-exports-sputter-due-to-sinking-china-orders/

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Trump’s Misplaced Oreo Rage, by James Bovard

Posted on April 5, 2016 | 5 comments

From James Bovard at usatoday.com:

Presidential front-runner Donald Trump vows that he will “never eat another Oreo again” to protest the transfer of 600 cookie-making jobs from Chicago to Mexico. And Trump is 100% correct when he condemns the factory’s exodus: “It’s unfair to us.”

But the villains who have destroyed the jobs of American workers are Congress and the Department of Agriculture, not Nabisco and free trade. It is the very protectionist policies The Donald advocates to help American industry “win” again that caused the Oreo job losses he decries. Federal policy has long kept the U.S. price of sugar at double or triple that found in the world market. Food manufacturers such as Nabisco are hostage to a Byzantine combination of price supports and arbitrary import restrictions that make producing candy and other sweets far more expensive here than in Canada or Mexico.

Federal sugar policy costs consumers $3 billion a year in a failed effort to save the jobs of sugar growers even as the number of such farmers has declined by almost 50% in recent decades.

That’s bad enough, but sugar policy is one of Uncle Sam’s most successful job destroyers. The Commerce Department estimated a decade ago that “for each one sugar growing and harvesting job saved through high U.S. sugar prices, nearly three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost.” Since 1997, sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 jobs in food manufacturing, according to a study by Agralytica, an economic consulting firm. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the United States.

Our Trumpian sugar policy has been an obvious failure since the 1980s. Fifteen years ago, there was a brief uproar when Brach’s Confections announced it would close its Chicago factory and move much of the production to Mexico. In 2002, Life Savers closed its Michigan factory and moved to Canada. Hershey’s has also closed U.S. facilities and moved jobs abroad. Sugar prices were the culprit in each case.

To continue reading: Trump’s Misplaced Oreo Rage

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First Ocean Freight Rates Collapse to “Zero,” China Freight Index Plunges to Record Low, Bailouts Loom, by Wolf Richter

Posted on March 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

The next stage of “Moral Hazard?”

The amount it costs to ship containers from China to ports around the world has plunged to historic lows. As container carriers are sinking deeper into trouble, whipped by lackluster global demand and rampant oversupply of container ships, they’re escalating a brutal price war with absurd consequences.

Maritime research and advisory firm Drewry (emphasis mine):

Recent news stories, backed up by anecdotal stories told to Drewry, report that carriers have quoted zero dollar freight rates to some forwarders on certain lanes out of Asia. Whether these are merely isolated cases or something more widespread is difficult to judge at the present time, but whatever the exact quantum, there is no denying the container rates are now close to the historic lows as seen in 2009.

The World Container Index, an average of spot freight rates on 11 global East-West routes connecting Asia, Europe, and the US, plunged last week to a record low of $666 per 40-foot equivalent unit container (FEU), down 73% from mid-2012!

The China Containerized Freight Index (CCFI) tells a similar story. It tracks contractual and spot-market rates for shipping containers from major ports in China to 14 regions around the world. On Friday, the index dropped 1.6% to 659.19, its lowest level ever!

It has plunged 39% from February last year and 34% since its inception in 1998 when it was set at 1,000:

Shippers and their customers are rejoicing for the moment. But the collapse in shipping rates – to “zero” in some cases, as Drewry reported – is taking its toll on the industry.

The risk of carrier bankruptcies – with the awkward side effect of stranded cargo – increases, according to Drewry, “the longer rates remain non-remunerative, while carriers will likely intensify practices such as void sailings in order to minimize the chance of that eventuality.”

To continue reading: First Ocean Freight Rates Collapse to “Zero,” China Freight Index Plunges to Record Low, Bailouts Loom

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World Trade Collapses in Dollars, Languishes in Volume, by Wolf Richter

Posted on March 25, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

This wasn’t part of the rosy scenario.

The Merchandise World Trade Monitor by the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a division of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, tracks global imports and exports in two measures: by volume and by unit price in US dollars. And the just released data for January was a doozie beneath the lackluster surface.

The World Trade Monitor for January, as measured in seasonally adjusted volume, declined 0.4% from December and was up a measly 1.1% from January a year ago. While the sub-index for import volumes rose 3% from a year ago, export volumes fell 0.7%. This sort of “growth,” languishing between slightly negative and slightly positive has been the rule last year.

The report added this about trade momentum:

Regional outcomes were mixed. Both import and export momentum became more negative in the United States. Both became more positive in the Euro Area. Import momentum in emerging Asia rose further, whereas export momentum in emerging Asia has been negative for four consecutive months.

This is also what the world’s largest container carrier, Maersk Lines, and others forecast for 2016: a growth rate of about zero to 1% in terms of volume. So not exactly an endorsement of a booming global economy.

But here’s the doozie: In terms of prices per unit expressed in US dollars, world trade dropped 3.8% in January from December and is down 12.1% from January a year ago, continuing a rout that started in June 2014. Not that the index was all that strong at the time, after having cascaded lower from its peak in May 2011.

If June 2014 sounds familiar as a recent high point, it’s because a lot of indices started heading south after that, including the price of oil, revenues of S&P 500 companies, total business revenues in the US…. That’s when the Fed was in the middle of tapering QE out of existence and folks realized that it would be gone soon. That’s when the dollar began to strengthen against other key currencies. Shortly after that, inventories of all kinds in the US began to bloat.

To continue reading: World Trade Collapses in Dollars, Languishes in Volume

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Let Me Show You Why Trump is Right on Trade Agreements, by Thad Beversdorf

Posted on March 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Thad Beversdorf at firstrebuttal.com:

Free trade is a great concept, as are free markets and freedom. The problem is none of these things exist in practice because they don’t provide sufficient advantages to the ruling class. The Fed and HFT systems now dominate global markets, western nations systematically overthrow any (freely elected) foreign government that doesn’t bow down to them and free trade agreements are put in place to ensure investors maximize profits no matter what the costs to society. Let’s focus on this last one.

You see rarely do nations turn away capital investment inflows. And so trade agreements are not created to allow for the free flow of capital as is generally touted. That is perhaps the biggest fallacy in the public’s perception of ‘free’ trade agreements. If a US company wants to build a factory in Vietnam and employ 200 workers there they will be welcomed with open arms. So then if these trade agreements are not meant to allow the free flow of capital what is their purpose?

It’s very simple. In microeconomic terms, it boils down to risk/reward. That is, all investments will generate some expected cash flow but will face some risks of realizing those cash flows. One way to improve return on investment is to lower costs, everything else equal. So if I can reduce my costs yet maintain my revenue and risk structures then I am better off. Corporations realized that one very easy way to reduce costs is to move labour to undeveloped nations where labour costs are only 5% to 10% of those in developed nations. That means I can greatly improve my returns to investors if I go ahead and move my operations overseas.

The caveat in the plan remember though is I have to be able to keep my revenue and risk structures the same. And this is where corporations realized they need a trade agreement. You see moving hundreds of millions in borrowed capital to a nation that has poor contract law and unstable governments adds a tremendous amount of risk to the investment model. And so the added risk (which significantly lowers the probability and thus value of future cash flows) creates new costs that essentially negate the reduction in costs obtained through cheaper labour. This means ROI doesn’t improve, which was the point of moving operations overseas.

To continue reading: Let Me Show You Why Trump is Right on Trade Agreements

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I’m in Awe at Just How Fast Global Trade is Unraveling, by Wolf Richter

Posted on February 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

It simply doesn’t let up. Global trade is skidding south at a breath-taking speed.

China produced a doozie:

The General Administration of Customs reported on Monday that in yuan terms, exports dropped 6.6% in January from a year ago while imports plunged 14.4%. In dollar terms, it was even worse due to the depreciation of the yuan since August: exports plunged 11.2% and imports 18.8%, far worse than economists had expected.

And so the trade surplus, powered by those plunging imports, jumped 12.2% to a record $63.3 billion.

This came on top of China’s deteriorating trade numbers last year, when exports had fallen 1.8% in yuan terms while imports had plunged 13.2%. Imports have now declined for 15 months in a row. That’s tough for the world economy.

OK, Chinese trade data can be heavily distorted by fake invoicing of “imports” from Hong Kong, a practice used to maneuver around capital controls and send money out of China. Imports from Hong Kong in January soared 108% from a year ago, even as shipments from other major trading partners declined. Bloomberg:

China has acknowledged a problem with fake invoicing in the past. In 2013, the government said export and import figures were overstated due to the phony trade to bring money into the mainland. Trade data for December suggested the practice had flared up again, this time to get money out.

In January, we have the additional fudge factor of the Lunar New Year. Chinese companies were closed all last week. It caused all kinds of front-loading in December and early January followed by a wind-down in late January and early February.

Oh, and India:

On Monday, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in Asia’s third largest economy reported that exports of goods plunged 13.6% in January year-over-year, the 14th month in a row of declines. To blame are crummy global demand, including in the US and Europe, and as always a weaker currency somewhere, this time in China.

To continue reading: I’m in Awe at Just How Fast Global Trade is Unraveling

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German Judges Pooh-Pooh Obama’s Sacred US-EU Trade Pact, by Don Quijones

Posted on February 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Don  Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

A damning indictment.

This past week saw the ceremonious signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Auckland, an event whose prime purpose was to convince the world that a trade agreement that most people have not even heard of and which has so far been approved by only one (Malaysia) out of 12 elected parliaments is already done and dusted.

Even the Sidney Morning Herald concedes that it was a giant PR exercise:

It masks the fact that for Australia and most TPP countries, the public debate and parliamentary process to pass implementing legislation, leading to final ratification of the deal, is just the beginning, and it will be a rocky road.

The road will be particularly rocky in the U.S. where the treaty’s safe passage through Congress and the Senate is far from guaranteed. Indeed, the trade agreement has become so toxic with the voting public that not a single presidential contender dares to endorse it. Even the former US Trade Representative, and now Senator, Rob Portman, has come out against TPP, albeit for the wrong reasons, most tellingly the fact that he, too, is up for reelection this autumn.

However, the biggest blow to the global corporatocracy’s bloated designs did not come from the U.S. It came from Germany, where the German Association of Judges (DRB, an association that also includes prosecutors) just issued a damning indictment on the EU’s proposal to establish an “investment court system (ICS)” for the TPP’s sister treaty, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

To continue reading: German Judges Pooh-Pooh Obama’s Sacred US-EU Trade Pact

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When Peace Breaks Out With Iran…, by Ron Paul

Posted on January 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

The money line from Ron Paul: “I have often said that the neocons’ greatest fear is for peace to break out.” From Paul at antiwar.org:

This has been the most dramatic week in US/Iranian relations since 1979.

Last weekend ten US Navy personnel were caught in Iranian waters, as the Pentagon kept changing its story on how they got there. It could have been a disaster for President Obama’s big gamble on diplomacy over conflict with Iran. But after several rounds of telephone diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, the Iranian leadership – which we are told by the neocons is too irrational to even talk to – did a most rational thing: weighing the costs and benefits they decided it made more sense not to belabor the question of what an armed US Naval vessel was doing just miles from an Iranian military base. Instead of escalating, the Iranian government fed the sailors and sent them back to their base in Bahrain.

Then on Saturday, the Iranians released four Iranian-Americans from prison, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. On the US side, seven Iranians held in US prisons, including six who were dual citizens, were granted clemency. The seven were in prison for seeking to trade with Iran in violation of the decades-old US economic sanctions.

This mutual release came just hours before the United Nations certified that Iran had met its obligations under the nuclear treaty signed last summer and that, accordingly, US and international sanctions would be lifted against the country.

How did the “irrational” Iranians celebrate being allowed back into the international community? They immediately announced a massive purchase of more than 100 passenger planes from the European Airbus company, and that they would also purchase spare parts from Seattle-based Boeing. Additionally, US oil executives have been in Tehran negotiating trade deals to be finalized as soon as it is legal to do so. The jobs created by this peaceful trade will be beneficial to all parties concerned. The only jobs that should be lost are the Washington advocates of reintroducing sanctions on Iran.

Events this week have dealt a harsh blow to Washington’s neocons, who for decades have been warning against any engagement with Iran. These true isolationists were determined that only regime change and a puppet government in Tehran could produce peaceful relations between the US and Iran. Instead, engagement has worked to the benefit of the US and Iran.

Proven wrong, however, we should not expect the neocons to apologize or even pause to reflect on their failed ideology. Instead, they will continue to call for new sanctions on any pretext. They even found a way to complain about the release of the US sailors – they should have never been confronted in the first place even if they were in Iranian waters. And they even found a way to complain about the return of the four Iranian-Americans to their families and loved ones – the US should have never negotiated with the Iranians to coordinate the release of prisoners, they grumbled. It was a show of weakness to negotiate! Tell that to the families on both sides who can now enjoy the company of their loved ones once again!

I have often said that the neocons’ greatest fear is for peace to break out. Their well-paid jobs are dependent on conflict, sanctions, and preemptive war. They grow wealthy on conflict, which only drains our economy. Let’s hope that this new opening with Iran will allow many other productive Americans to grow wealthy through trade and business ties. Let’s hope many new productive jobs will be created on both sides. Peace is prosperous!

http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2016/01/17/when-peace-breaks-out-with-iran/

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