Free Republic

The Chinese regime’s trade war on Australia appears to be backfiring after strong demand for Australian exports have resulted in the nation recording its fourth-highest trade surplus. Preliminary international trade figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Monday show Australia recorded a $9 billion goods trade surplus in December, up from $7.4 billion in November. While imports from China fell by $641 million or 7 percent, exports to China increased by $2.3 billion or 21 percent in December, driven primarily by iron ore and wheat. This comes amid China’s economic trade sanctions, which has seen trade disruptions...

The U.S. Treasury Department has incorrectly labeled China a manipulator of its currency. An important distinction exists between devaluing a currency and currency depreciation. Devaluing implies the People’s Bank of China actively manipulated the value of the Chinese renminbi to gain unfair advantage for its exports. Depreciation simply means the renminbi has lost purchasing power relative to the U.S. dollar, based on market forces. There’s no indication that China is actively devaluing its currency. However, according to the Treasury Department, China met a broad definition of manipulation laid out in the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, which says...

Maybe Donald Trump is such a powerful communicator and pot-stirrer that other countries, embarrassed by their own trade barriers, will eliminate them. Then I will thank the president for the wonderful thing he did. Genuine free trade will be a recipe for wonderful economic growth. But I fear the opposite: a trade war and stagnation -- because much of what Trump and his followers say is economically absurd. "(If) you don't have steel, you don't have a country!" announced the president. Lots of things are essential to America -- and international trade is the best way to make sure we...

BREAKING - Top US Source says "deal is done" re #NAFTA. Joint statement from @USTradeRep & Canada's Freeland expected soon. I'm told #NAFTA deal was reached around 9:30pm tonight. Canada giving a larger % of its dairy market to US products in exchange for cultural protection & some form of dispute resolution process (formerly Ch 19).

President Trump’s administration has a “selfish” attitude toward intellectual property rights, a Chinese diplomat said Friday amid the White House's crackdown on IP theft. “No one has the monopoly over the application of IPR to promote social and economic development,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters. “Innovation and IPR shall be harnessed for the progress and benefit of all mankind, instead of being reduced to a tool used by the U.S. to suppress others' development and serve its selfish interests.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday struck back at US President Donald Trump’s repeated complaints over the US trade deficit. Merkel pointed out the United States actually runs a significant account surplus with Europe if one factors services into the equation. She went on to say that the current accounting systems for global trade needed to be updated to also take services into account. “Trade surpluses are calculated in a relatively old-fashioned way nowadays,” she told an audience of businessmen at the Christian Democratic Union’s Economic Council Conference in Berlin. “If services are included in the trade balance, then the...

Japan reports that it posted its biggest trade surplus in over four years in February, thanks to a strengthening in the yen and weak oil prices. The 242.8 billion yen ($2.2 billion) surplus reported Thursday compares with a deficit of 426 billion yen a year earlier and a deficit of 648.8 billion yen in January. …

China's politically sensitive trade surplus with the United States widened by 19.7 percent from a year earlier to $17.6 billion.

A day after a US Treasury Department report bluntly denounced Germany’s economic model, accusing it of hampering the eurozone recovery and hurting global growth, Germany called the conclusions “incomprehensible” and challenged the US to “analyze its own economic situation.” The Treasury’s semiannual currency report criticized Germany’s over-reliance on exports, a high current-account surplus and weak domestic demand. These factors “have hampered re-balancing at a time when many other euro-area countries have been under severe pressure,” the report concluded, citing budget tightening in the euro periphery. “The net result has been a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as...

The Chinese sure are doing a lot of worrying these days about the stalemate in Washington. Li Keqiang, China’s Premier, told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that he was watching the tussle over raising the government’s debt ceiling with “great attention” in a meeting last week. He has good reason to be concerned. With a stash of nearly $1.3 trillion in Treasury securities, China is the world’s largest foreign owner of U.S. government debt. If the U.S. Congress fails to lift the ceiling to allow the government to borrow more by Thursday, Washington may not have enough money to...

EU and Chinese firms should have equal access to each other’s markets, the bloc’s leading trade official said Tuesday, warning that Beijing would not be able to subsidize its industries and maintain economic growth. “The growth model that has brought the country to the gates of prosperity will not be the one that takes them through,” EU trade commissioner Karel de Gucht said, at an event organized by the EU Chamber of Commerce in China. But de Gucht played down recent trade “frictions” between Brussels and Beijing. …

The United States had a trade surplus every year from 1894 to 1970. The trade deficits started in 1971. 1975 was the last year the United States had a trade surplus. We have had a trade deficit every year since 1976.

You have to love the Chinese. No sooner had Standard and Poors downgraded U.S. debt than Beijing let loose with a huge scold about how Ameica has to get its debt under control. Normally I'd be lambasting Uncle Sam right along with the Chinese. For more than thirty years I have been urging that U.S. incentives to save and spend be reversed in an effort to weaken the dollar, reduce the U.S. trade deficit, and increase domestic investment, production, and jobs. But in this case, I just can't allow the Chinese gall to go unremarked even though their criticism is...

China sees rocky export rebound, shrinking surplus October 31, 2009 1:17 AM ET All Thomson Reuters news BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's exports face a "hard and tortuous" path to recovery as uncertainties dog the global economy's gradual return to health, with this year's trade surplus set to shrink from last year's record, the Commerce Ministry said. Commerce Minister Chen Deming told a conference on Saturday that China's trade surplus was expected to fall to $180 billion to $190 billion this year from last year's record $295.5 billion. The surplus was $136.4 billion in the first nine months of the year....

China does not manipulate renminbi exchange rate During an economist dialogue event held on May 11, Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Economics Prize winner claimed that China's huge trade surplus is the result of government intervention and the world cannot continue to accept such tremendous trade deficit caused by China. Long Yongtu, Secretary General of the Boao Forum for Asia, responded by saying that China should not be criticized for its huge trade surplus. China blamed for trade surplus Krugman argued that China's huge trade surplus is a result of government policies and the deficit would not run this high...

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 Groundwork for Trade Conflict Being Laid? We have worried out loud that the policy remedies being pursued by the US amount to trying to restore the status quo ante to as great a degree as possible, particularly in trying to resturn US overconsumption to something approaching its former levels. Although it may be difficult to work two agendas, crisis response and addressing the root causes of our economic mess in parallel, focusing solely on the former runs the considerable risk of that we will see only a shallow recovery, with many of the elements of the...

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of seven books on international affairs, including America's Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan (2006). The People's Republic of China continues to send worrisome signals about its security strategy. As the tone of cross-straits relations grows increasingly strident, China's latest military reshuffle and ongoing lack of transparency about its military budget are creating new tensions with both the United States and its neighbors in East Asia. In the lead-up to the opening of the Communists' 17th National Party Congress...

Mega import deals with US likely soon By Jiang Wei (China Daily) Updated: 2007-04-18 07:10 China is likely to ink mega import deals, possibly amounting to $12 billion, with the United States during the second Sino-US strategic economic dialogue next month, in a move to narrow the trade gap. The talks, which will be co-chaired by Vice-Premier Wu Yi and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, are the highest-profile dialogue mechanism over economic issues between the two. The proposed procurement delegation is likely to be led by Vice-Minister of Commerce Ma Xiuhong, covering a wide range of US agricultural and industrial...

Barely noticed, Germany has overtaken America to become the world's biggest single exporter, shipping the hardware that powers the rising economies of Asia and eastern Europe. Its trade surplus is now greater than that of China, Japan and India combined, reaching a staggering 16.8 billion euros in June alone. The profits made by German companies are running at over 33 per cent of national income, the highest in 40 years. Eyeing a bargain, the world's canniest are already piling into German assets for the great Teutonic rebound. George Soros and fellow hedge funders are snapping up distressed banks. Britain's Terra...

TOKYO, May 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Japan's current account surplus hit arecord high of 18.29 trillion yen (about 171 billion US dollars) in fiscal 2004, up 5.8 percent from a year earlier and logging a record high for the second straight year, according to a preliminary report released by Japanese Finance Ministry on Monday. It was also the third straight yearly expansion, and was spurred by brisk exports to the Asian and US markets and a record high surplus in the income account, the ministry said in the report. The balance of trade in goods and services for the year to...