Free Republic

Industrial Policy: Donald Trump has been bashing Ford for deciding to shift small car production to Mexico. He's pointing the finger of blame at the wrong target. A big driver behind Ford's move is President Obama's push for tougher federal fuel mandates. Earlier this year, Ford (F) announced that it was building a major small-car assembly plant south of the border, and more recently said it was going to shift all its small car production to Mexico within a few years. Trump has called it an "absolute disgrace" and says he'd hit Ford with a 35% import tax on these...

A bronze buckle and a cylindrical metal bead found in Alaska are the first hard evidence of trade between Asia and the indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic, centuries before contact with Europeans, archaeologists say. An analysis of the artifacts has shown that they were smelted in East Asia out of lead, copper, and tin, before finding their way to an indigenous village some 700 years ago.

Trump’s populist campaign is fueled by working-class anger about unfair trade, an issue the Democrats need to reclaim The Democratic Party could have blocked the rise of Donald Trump years ago if it had just listened. The story of Trump’s amazingly successful movement is also the story of how Democrats turned their backs on their working-class roots and sided with the elites on the crucial economic question of our times: Who would win from globalization, and who would lose? The facts are stark. Since 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect and the U.S. began the...

...Trump called the trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country” during the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year, Bernie Sanders leveled a similar criticism, calling it disastrous when debating the former secretary of date... ...But whether NAFTA has been good or bad for the U.S. economy depends largely on who you ask... ...NAFTA “means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement,” then-President Clinton said in 1993. Fast forward more than two decades later and NAFTA...

The United States does not have a coherent strategy to deal with a rising People's Republic of China in the Western Pacific. Nor do foreign policy experts specializing in the Asia-Pacific region have a concrete set of ideas to coax an increasingly assertive Beijing into accepting the U.S.-led post-Second World War liberal-institutional world order or to reassert Washington's dominance in the region. It is becoming increasingly clear that China hopes to chart its own course independent of the existing Western frameworks as Beijing reaffirms its claims to the South China Sea and continues to build artificial islands in the region,...

The International Monetary Fund has warned that free trade is increasingly seen as benefiting only the well-off and that help is needed for those whose job prospects have been damaged by globalisation in order to put fresh momentum behind removing barriers to international commerce. In a chapter from the half-yearly World Economic Outlook study released ahead of its annual meeting next week, the IMF said the weakness of the global economy, rather than a wave of protectionism, had been largely responsible for the sharp slowdown in trade growth over the past four years. But it said the uptick in protectionist...

The reporter asks White House spokesliar Josh Earnest questions regarding the determination of Hussein Obama to force through what should be titled the Corporate Government Fascism Enablement And Benefits Act, what is deceptively marketed as a trade agreement, TPP. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is strongly opposed by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton claims to have flip-flopped her position and now be opposed to it. That’s a point that Donald Trump made in the first debate, that she was initially in favor of it and her newfound dedication to its defeat is tepid at best. He also voiced his belief that if...

Trade is under attack in much of the world, because economists failed to anticipate the accompanying joblessness, and governments failed to help. For as long as ships have ventured across water, laborers like Patrick Duijzers have tied their fortunes to trade. He is a longshoreman here at Europe’s largest port, and his black Jack Daniel’s T-shirt, hoop earrings and copious rings give Mr. Duijzers the look of a bohemian pirate. His wages put him solidly in the Dutch middle class: He has earned enough to buy an apartment and enjoy vacations to Spain. Lately, though, Mr. Duijzers has come to...

Bruce Stokes of the Pew Research Center based in Washington, DC, was in Delhi for a series of talks. He presented results of opinion polls that offer an interesting insight into the contemporary American mind Every leap year, the United States presidential election becomes the most watched such event in the world. The quantum of coverage only grows with each successive election, as media and social media capacities expand worldwide. Yet, this year the election has acquired a special significance due to a mix of factors. First, there are the compelling personalities -- in their own ways, Donald Trump and...

Guess what? A President Trump could adopt his new trade agenda without any authorization from Congress -- and this could trigger a global trade war and a deep U.S. recession. Policies that promise to make us stronger economically could do the opposite. That's the main take-away of a study... ...Trump could implement most of his proposals, which repudiate decades of pro-trade policies, by executive order. So contends Peterson's Gary Hufbauer after a review of trade laws. Over the past century, Hufbauer says, Congress has passed many laws that "authorize the president to impose tariffs...... ...Trump's bluster may simply be a...

Ford Motor Company made headlines on Wednesday, September 9, when, during an investor conference, CEO Mark Fields told attendees that it will invest $1.6 billion building a manufacturing plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and will move all of its small car production there during the next two to three years. The announcement was hardly news as Ford has been talking about the shift for more than a year. But in the throes of an election that has both candidates decrying companies that send jobs to low-wage countries, the decision was an invitation for attention. The next day, during a...

<p>Bill Clinton told CNBC on Tuesday that activist investors, rather than trade deals, are partially at fault for U.S. corporations moving operations out into Mexico.</p> <p>GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump has called for "economic independence" and blamed globalization for "totally" wiping out the American middle class. Trump has previously called NAFTA "the worst trade deal in history" and blamed Bill and Hillary Clinton for endorsing it.</p>

WASHINGTON—Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich took over the White House briefing lectern on Friday to praise the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, an unusual move that shows how hard President Barack Obama will push for the trade deal's approval.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich today joined President Barack Obama's effort to push Congress to approve a sweeping Pacific Rim trade deal that has appeared doomed for months. Kasich went so far as to meet with Obama at the White House, then address reporters there on the Trans Pacific Partnership....

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump put new details on a much scaled-back tax plan on Thursday, one that is projected to cost the federal government less money but also to deliver fewer benefits to taxpayers than Trump's original proposal. Trump's economic team estimated that the complete tax plan, combined with rollbacks to some federal regulations and new initiatives to open up more public and private lands for oil and gas drilling, would deliver 3.5 percent growth per year for the next decade and produce 25 million new jobs. The changes also appear to be an attempt to reduce what analysts...

Donald Trump on Thursday shared his economic vision with supporters gathered at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, promising trillions in tax cuts, energy reform, a crackdown on trade, and a reduction in the number of tax brackets. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, estimated his plan would create 25 million in new jobs, and that the massive tax cut would be offset by gross domestic product growth of at least 3.5%, on average, each year for the next decade. "This is the most pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-family plan put forth perhaps in the history of our country," Trump said, according to...

The problems that sank South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping last week could be just the tip of the iceberg, with the long global downturn leaving the industry burdened by excess capacity. With growth refusing to budge and consumer demand still slack, the world’s freight carriers have more ships than they can fill — a quarter of cargo space lies empty. That has led to fierce price cuts and cut-throat competition, badly impacting the bottom lines of some of the giants of the seas. Those problems played out last week when Hanjin, the world’s seventh-largest shipping firm, filed for bankruptcy in Seoul,...

If the government prevented people from shopping outside of their own town or state, they would be outraged and recognize it as limiting their freedom. If Michigan businesses were prevented from buying or selling their products to people from other states, most people would understand that to be economically destructive. Yet when it comes to the issue of foreign trade a lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum are opposed to allowing a similar free flow of products and services between countries. That’s why the two main presidential candidates are able to run their campaigns with antitrade...

Investors in the transportation sector are facing a sea of change thanks to the rise of online commerce. A major part of that change is Amazon.com, and the firms move towards using in-house transportation portends of more evolution to come. With thousands of shipments daily, Amazon.com is leading the way in creating its own in-house transportation via airplanes. This could potentially pave a path for other online retailers, as well as for the future development of other devices like drones which threaten companies that may not have the available funds to invest in them.

A new study has energized a century-long debate at the heart of China's national identity. On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070...