Free Republic

The Trump administration has asked China to reduce its trade imbalance with the United States by $US100 billion even as it prepares tariffs on imports. (please see link for full article)

President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum look like an effort that goes beyond its stated rationale of preserving national security. The tariffs could be the first of a number of initiatives by the Trump administration to retaliate against unfair foreign trade practices. “We’re going to see who’s treating us fairly, who’s not treating us fairly,” Trump said at the White House on March 8 while rolling out the new trade barriers. Trump signed orders imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. However, he has kept the doors...

March 14 (Reuters) - The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 250 points on Wednesday as U.S. manufacturers continued to suffer from concerns over the impact of new tariffs on trade. (please see full article at the link)

US Considering Broad Curbs On Chinese Imports -- Zero Hedge, 5 March, 2018 -- First thing this morning, when the market was surging and inexplicably rejoicing in the certainty that Trump would back down on tariffs, a nagging feeling that this was all wrong prompted us to ask "What If Trump Does Not Back Down", and to follow it up with a troubling rumor from Strategas, namely that this is all about China, and would involve a massive amount of tariffs, to wit: Trump himself has also said that the trade wars have one major target: Beijing, with the rest...

(excerpt from the Video link) As part of the research for my Crouching Tiger book on the rise of China’s military and its companion documentary film, I interviewed 35 of the top experts in the world from all sides of the China issue. These are key edited excerpts from my sit-down at the University of Chicago with Professor John Mearsheimer, author of the realist classic work The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

An investigation would reveal a great deal about Obama and the the shadowy, sleazy, and corrupt habits of the establishment-political class SAN JOSE, CA—In mid-March, a group of United States senators wrote a letter to newly appointed Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, demanding he launch an investigation into funding that th

China’s own system is jammed with rotten debt held in off-balance sheet state enterprises. Its countryside is littered with eerie, empty ghost towns. And Moody’s Investors Service says last month that China’s local debt was understated by hundreds of billions of dollars. Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/08/07/chinas-debt-problem-worse-than-portugal-1014895568/#ixzz1UTHEy1aW

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy slowed markedly in the first quarter and inflation accelerated, clear evidence of the double whammy on the economy from higher gasoline prices. In its first estimate Thursday, the Commerce Department said gross domestic product rose at a 1.8% annual rate between January and March, slower than the 3.1% pace in the prior three months. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected a slightly weaker 1.7% growth rate. They blamed the slowdown on weather disruptions and higher gasoline prices, as well as a drop in defense spending. See our economic calendar with forecasts of major indicators....

Beneath the endless announcements of Greece's "rescue" lie fundamental asymmetries that doom the euro, the joint currency that has been the centerpiece of European unity since its introduction in 1999. The key imbalance is between export powerhouse Germany, which generates huge trade surpluses, and its trading partners, which run large trade and budget deficits, particularly Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Those outside of Europe may be surprised to learn that Germany's exports are roughly equal to those of China ($1.2 trillion), even though Germany's population of 82 million is a mere 6% of China's 1.3 billion. Germany and China...

POZNAN, Poland (AFP) – The head of the world's top climate scientists says he is stunned at the trillion-dollar cheques that have been signed to ease the banking crisis when funding for poverty and global warming is scrutinised or denied. In an interview on the sidelines of the UN climate talks here, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he was both astonished and dismayed at the imbalance. "It seems very strange, what has happened in the past two or three months," he told AFP. "It defies any kind of logic, if you look...

Stays away from topic of financial market turmoil In a speech in Berlin on Tuesday, Bernanke did not address the current financial market turmoil or credit crunch. His comments stuck to the troubling issue of the large U.S. current account gap and corresponding surpluses in China and oil-exporting countries. Many economists and the International Monetary Fund have worried for years that there might be a sudden, sharp decline in foreign appetite for U.S. dollars, requiring higher U.S. interest rates to attract the necessary foreign capital to fund American's spendthrift ways. "What are the prospects for a gradual and orderly rebalancing...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush's administration declined to cite China as a manipulator of currency values to gain unfair trade advantages and rejected a request by U.S. lawmakers to file a trade case against China on the issue. The Bush administration's actions Wednesday provoked an outcry from members of the U.S. Congress who said America's soaring trade deficit with China had cost thousands of manufacturing jobs and deserved a much tougher response on the part of the administration to crack down on unfair Chinese trade practices. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who is leading the Bush administration's effort to...

The bilateral deficit with China has increased almost without pause for 20 years even as both exports and imports were on the rise. In 1985, the two sides traded less than $4 billion in products each way, and their trade was close to balanced. (See table below.) By 1995 the U.S. trade deficit had already risen to $33.8 billion. By 2004, U.S. exports to China were close to three times higher than in 1995, but imports from China were more than four times higher.

  Asia-Pacific China July trade surplus hits record $14.6bn BEIJING (Reuters) - Aug 10, 2006 China's trade surplus set a record in July for the third month in a row, the government said on Thursday, underscoring growing concerns among policy makers about China's economic imbalances. The customs administration said the surplus rose to $14.6 billion from $10.4 billion in July 2005.Economists polled by Reuters had expected the surplus to be unchanged from June's $14.5 billion.Cheng Manjiang, an economist with Bank of China International in Beijing, said the surplus may peak this quarter, especially if the government makes good on...

China raking it in China's trade surplus hit a monthly high in May. The surplus is on pace to surpass last year's record. May exports jumped 25.1% from a year earlier to $73.11 billion, picking up from a 23.9% increase in April, according to customs figures issued yesterday. Imports rose a more modest 21.7%. The trade surplus, the excess of exports over imports, surged to $13 billion for the month, 44% higher than in May of last year. Low-tech, labor-intensive goods like footwear and toys haven’t been great performers this year, but China’s booming electronics sector and its growing prowess...

AmericanEconomicAlert.org | Fighting for American Companies, Fighting for American Jobs China Seeks to Perpetuate Advantages, Not Solve Problems By William R. Hawkins Thursday, April 20, 2006 As Chinese President Hu Jintao comes to Washington for a summit with President George W. Bush, all those watching the media reports and reading the official statements released by the two governments should remember the most famous words of the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, “Warfare is the Way (Tao) of deception.” The techniques of Chinese propaganda developed during the Cold War have not been abandoned, only modernized. Over the last year, Beijing has...

Physicists for decades have used "dark matter" as Spackle to fill pesky anomalies that seem to defy theories about gravity, the Big Bang and more. Recently, economists have proposed a similar fix for apparent anomalies in U.S. economic data. Unlike dark matter in space, dark matter in economics is a concept that has been mostly derided by other economists. If it's real, though, it might be no joke for investors. Harvard economists Ricardo Hausmann and Frederico Sturzenegger, [advance] a theory to explain something that has bugged economists and investors for years: A persistent trade deficit has built up a mountain...

Ricardo Hausmann Kennedy School of Government Center for International Development,, Harvard University Federico Sturzenegger Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella November 13, 2005 Over the last couple of years the bludgeoning of the US current account deficit, currently ticking at over 700 billion dollars a year in 2005 alone, has led to significant concerns about the future of the US and the possibility of a major global crisis. It comes after 27 years of unbroken deficits which have totaled over 5 trillion dollars. Once the massive financing required to keep on paying for such a...

Chinese tiger runs towards the trap The Daily Telegraph 02/14/06 author: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard China's trade surplus surged 46.7pc in January year-on-year as the emerging giant continued to shoot up the technology ladder, becoming a net exporter of cars for the first time. Copying the export models of Japan and South Korea, China is now building auto production plant at breakneck speed, with plans to double its current capacity of 8.7m vehicles a year. Analysts warn that China's industrial strategy is leading to rampant over-investment, unmatched by growth of internal demand. The mix is posing an increasing threat to the global...

Outside View: China's money and stability By Dr. Peter Morici WASHINGTON, Jun 22, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Not since the United States floated the dollar in the 1970s and threw the Bretton Woods system on the scrap heap of failed ideas has the management of exchange rates so fixed the attention of both economists and national politicians as China's yuan peg does now. Then as now all manner of polemics and rationalizations and the weight of established authority argued that governments should fix currency exchange rates, which are nothing more than prices, much like governments fix the...