Free Republic

Eye-catching numbers have emerged on the expected trade boom from the Arctic route to Europe for Chinese business.Cosco Shipping - part of China's state-owned shipping giant Cosco Group - announced its maiden voyage with a multi-purpose vessel last week. 'The ship left Dalian port in Northeast China's Liaoning province and is scheduled to take 33 days to reach Europe,' reported China Daily. 'It is the first time a Chinese merchant ship has travelled to Europe via the Arctic Northeast Passage. The total deadweight tonnage of the multipurpose vessel is 19,461 tons. The ship is expected to arrive in the Bering...

Monthly U.S. headlines trumpeting the death of inflation hide a painful truth for American families: rapidly rising food prices. News reports rarely mention this pain because economists' preferred inflation metric, so-called "core CPI," omits both food and energy due to concerns about their volatility. Although this omission might make sense from a purely economic perspective, it does a disservice to voters because several federal government policies that enrich a few special interests have conspired to keep American grocery bills high and rising. There can be little doubt that food prices have spiked in recent years, especially in relation to other...

The World Trade Organization reports that the growth rate of global trade fell sharply from over 5% in 2011 to around 2% in 2012. [snip]...the U.S.’ “Buy American” initiative on government procurement (folded into the Obama stimulus package in 2009) probably restrained trade flows in a near-negligible way. No doubt that’s true, since it’s confined to certain categories of construction procurement and has more than a few loopholes. But does this mean that Buy American, or Buy French, or Buy Japanese, or Buy Madagascar stipulations on procurement are harmless after all?[snip]... the Dean Baker analysis reduces “Buy American” to the...

When will Republicans wake up to the way U.S. jobs are betrayed by Barack Obama and the corporate interests that hide under the moniker "free trade"? It's an embarrassment that Republican powers-that-be have joined with the Obama Democrats to push the new Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. We should have recognized free trade as bad news when Obama hammered on it in his State of the Union message. He probably looks upon it as another strategy to redistribute the wealth of our country, which is a major goal of his administration. In 2012 when Congress was passing the Korea-U.S. Trade...

In fact, Barack Obama "fired" the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, as he thanked him first for the great job all these years."This was really impressive. I nearly fell off my chair, when I heard the president's comment", said the former commander of the Federal Reserve, Larry Meyer for CNBC.However, the question is who will take the reins of the world economy in such a critical period?[snip]

Chinese Trade Numbers Come In Massively Below Forecasts Fran Wang, Agence France Presse June 8, 2013, 6:07 AM Reuters China on Saturday reported a sharp slowdown in exports in May compared to the previous month while imports unexpectedly dropped, as the world's second largest economy grapples with slowing growth and sluggish overseas demand. Overseas shipments rose just one percent to $182.8 billion last month, far lower than 14.7 percent recorded in April, customs authorities said in a statement. It also missed a medium forecast of 5.6 percent expansion in a Dow Jones Newswires' poll of economists. Imports dropped 0.3 percent...

Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications. The president of the country's national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing's growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The name of the company and other details have yet to be released, but the opposition congressman Luis Callejas said the government planned to grant a 100-year lease to the Chinese operator. The national...

IF you were the leaders of the State of California and you were hemorrhaging businesses, with entire industries leaving as fast as they could pack and taking jobs with them, what would you do? Assist with job training? Offer tax credits? Ease regulations? Wrong. The State of California didn't do that. Instead, they looked at the few still struggling industrial businesses dumb enough to want to still operate in this hostile environment and asked why? Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/california_to_industry_get_lost.html#ixzz2VRWtWLXw Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Barack Obama With His Hand On The Resolute DeskDid you know that Barack Obama has been secretly negotiating the most important trade agreement since the formation of the World Trade Organization? Did you know that this agreement will impose very strict Internet copyright rules, ban all "Buy American" laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore? If you have not heard about this treaty, don't feel bad. Obama has refused to even give Congress a copy of the draft agreement and he has banned members of Congress from attending...

<p>The VAT is used as a trade strategy to accomplish the same benefits as currency devaluation. The VAT strategy is called “fiscal devaluation” and I’ll explain it at the bottom. It took me three years to understand the power of the VAT in trade strategy, so I understand why it takes others a while to think through it. But the price differential result (as between domestic and imported products) is substantial. And we need it to neutralize what other countries have done.</p>

Like most academics, professors of economics are not generally stupid people, IQ-wise. But they do have a remarkable ability to lose sight of basic realities. I’ve seen this over and over again. I just had an extended e-mail exchange with one Ron Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, about the trade deficit. Now I’m not going to offer any comment on it, and will just let the reader judge for himself who’s right in the back-and-forth below. (Feel free to post a comment or e-mail me if you think I was mistaken.) ************* Dear Mr. Fletcher: I...

The Smoot-Hawley tariff passed in 1931 is the silver bullet of Free Trade advocates. All other arguments do not matter for them because they say the Smoot-Hawley tariffs either were part of the cause of the Great Depression or were responsible for continuing the depression by reducing international trade. This reasoning does not hold up to close inspection. Smoot-Hawley did not cause the Great Depression, nor did it extend the Depression. ... In general, the statistical arguments made by current Free Traders are deceptions. They generally say something like, "the United States economy grew after NAFTA." That may be true,...

When economic patriotism died Pat Buchanan agrees with the pope about ' the dark side of globalism' “This is called slave labor,” said Pope Francis. The Holy Father was referring to the $40 a month paid to apparel workers at that eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400. “Not paying a just wage … focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at personal profit. That goes against God!” The pope is describing the dark side of globalism. Why is Bangladesh, after China, the second-largest producer of apparel in...

For anybody disheartened about years of disappointing economic news, Japan's recent announcement that it intends to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) offers a real reason to celebrate.Free trade agreements (FTAs) historically are some of the most surefire ways to open up new markets to U.S. exporters while enhancing American interests abroad. They create economic growth by fostering innovation and efficiency and, as a bonus, they generally produce invaluable political benefits.As FTAs go, Japan's participation in TPP makes this trade pact the Super Bowl and the World Cup of trade agreements wrapped into one. It's a game changer.It will give American...

A study of the Bitcoin exchange industry has found that 45 percent of exchanges fail, taking their users' money with them. Those that survive are the ones that handle the most traffic -- but they are also the exchanges that suffer the greatest number of cyber attacks. Computer scientists Tyler Moore (from the Southern Methodist University, Dallas) and Nicolas Christin (of Carnegie Mellon University) found 40 exchanges on the web which offered a service of changing bitcoins into other fiat currencies or back again. Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business -- 13 closing without warning, and five...

Stretching from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca chokepoint in the southwest to the Strait of Taiwan in the northeast, the South China Sea is one of the most important energy trade routes in the world. Almost a third of global crude oil and over half of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes through the South China Sea each year. The Strait of Malacca is the shortest sea route between African and Persian Gulf suppliers and Asian consumers. The strait is a critical transit chokepoint and has become increasingly important over the last two decades. In 1993, about 7 million...

ustralia is seeking to bypass trading in U.S. dollars with China in an effort to avoid the commercial uncertainties that come with the recent fluctuations in the greenback. For example, just a half a year ago, the dollar traded at about $1.20 to the euro; by February, it had weakened to $1.34 per euro and now it is going for $1.27. Eliminating the dollar in trade will be the focus of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s trip to Beijing next week. Trade with China, Australia’s primary trading partner, totaled $120 billion in the last fiscal year. China buys nearly one-third...

(Reuters) - A long-term U.S. manufacturing rebound is under way, and it will likely endure because the United States is becoming more competitive with China and other emerging economies. According to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group titled "Made in America, Again," the cost advantage China has over the United States is shrinking fast. "Within five years, rising Chinese wages, higher U.S. productivity, a weaker dollar, and other factors will virtually close the cost gap between the U.S. and China for many goods consumed in North America," the report said.

Washington: The United States and Japan on Friday agreed on language aimed at giving Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe political cover to bring the world’s third-largest economy into negotiations on a US-led free trade agreement in the Asia Pacific region. In a carefully worded statement following Abe’s meeting with President Barack Obama, the two countries reaffirmed that “all goods would subject to negotiation” if Japan joins the talks with the United States and 10 other countries. At the same time, the statement leaves open a possible outcome to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, talks where the Japan could still protect...

China has leapfrogged the US to become the world’s biggest trading nation, bringing an end to the US’s post-war dominance of global commerce. The total value of US exports and imports in 2012 was $3.82 trillion (£2.4 trillion), the US Commerce Department has revealed. China’s customs administration has already announced that the country’s total trade last year was worth $3.87 trillion. “It is remarkable that an economy that is only a fraction of the size of the US economy has a larger trading volume,” Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, told Bloomberg....