But the trade deficits are enormous and growing. Here's a chart I just found on the MERCHANDISE balance of trade deficit:
And here's the cumulative trade deficit:
Posted on 05/18/2008 11:19:43 AM PDT by neverdem
Back in August, during the panic over mortgages, Alan Greenspan offered reassurance to an anxious public. The current turmoil, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman said, strongly resembled brief financial scares such as the Russian debt crisis of 1998 or the U.S. stock market crash of 1987. Not to worry.
But in the background, one could hear the groans and feel the tremors as larger political and economic tectonic plates collided. Nine months later, Greenspan's soothing analogies no longer wash. The U.S. economy faces unprecedented debt levels, soaring commodity prices and sliding home prices, to say nothing of a weak dollar. Despite the recent stabilization of the economy, some economists fear that the world will soon face the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s.
That analogy is hardly a perfect fit; there's almost no chance of another sequence like the Great Depression, where the stock market dove 80 percent, joblessness reached 25 percent, and the Great Plains became a dustbowl that forced hundreds of thousands of "Okies" to flee to California. But Americans should worry that the current unrest betokens the sort of global upheaval that upended previous leading world economic powers, most notably Britain.
More than 80 percent of Americans now say that we are on the wrong track, but many if not most still believe that the history of other nations is irrelevant -- that the United States is unique, chosen by God...
--snip--
In the United States, the financial services sector passed manufacturing as a component of the GDP in the mid-1990s. But market enthusiasm seems to have blocked any debate over this worrying change: In the 1970s, manufacturing occupied 25 percent of GDP and financial services just 12 percent, but by 2003-06, finance enjoyed 20-21 percent, and manufacturing had shriveled to 12 percent...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Read it and weep. Change and produce more than fiat currency, or fade away.
A giant bird could fly in from the asteroid belt and eat the moon and then what would NASA do?
How can we possibly start “making things” if it costs us 100 times more than a Chinese factory to make them? Even if we do, who’s gonna buy it when the same thing can be had for less?
It’s not so simple as that.
Yes, I think I posted the comment that I heard going around last year, that the only remaining major export of the United States is derivatives.
And that market is collapsing.
Domestically there is no difference between (R) and (D). It’s a one party spending spree.
Well it all kinda depends. If the country elects a radical President, who promptly raises taxes, I’d say, yeah, we’re scroooood!
Pity we won’t hear this from the WP.
I call BS on that one. We’re a net exporter of food. We also export aircraft, nuclear equipment (for reactors), and many others I can’t recall without a quick search.
Repeal the Thirteenth Amendment so that we can compete with the Chinese?
As the dollar falls, the Chinese price advantage also falls. Unfortunately the extreme regulation American industry is subjected to would probably still make it hard for them to compete even without the currency advantage. I’d like an environmentalist to propose protective tariffs for American industry on the grounds that they are more Earth friendly.
Of course not. Because all factual data proves you to be complete and wholly wrong, you simply refuse to debate the fact because since they do not validate your emotion based opinions. What an utter waste of time of a post. We do not care what you feel and you will not bother to listen to any facts that do not validate preconceived feelings!
But don't bother then with the facts. These threads are about really really old Dincons venting their frustrations about getting old, not about them having anything resembling a clue about modern Economics. Always amazes me how close the Dincons are to the Marxists in their demands for a Command driven Economy
At least Phillips doesn’t call himself a Republican anymore.
Big whoop!
So what if our hegemony disappears! Bigger isn’t better. A small coherent constitutional republic is superior to a Supercenter sized democracy populated with a large chunk of people who subsist on government handouts.
Let the hegemony end. Reduce the size (in real terms) of the government by 40% and become a constitutional republic again!
Sounds like a good trade to me.
Yours truly,
The Woim
It’s not so simple as that.
We could start with becoming energy producers, any which way we can, without subsidy, first for our own consumption, then for export.
But the trade deficits are enormous and growing. Here's a chart I just found on the MERCHANDISE balance of trade deficit:
And here's the cumulative trade deficit:
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally. This isn't about politics; it's about economics, in particular this consumer driven economy that staring to look like the emperor with no clothes.
"The downside is that the final four or five percentage points of financial-sector GDP expansion in the 1990s and 2000s involved mischief and self-dealing: the exotic mortgage boom, the reckless bundling of loans into securities and other innovations better left to casinos. Run-amok credit was the lubricant. Between 1987 and 2007, total debt in the United States jumped from $11 trillion to $48 trillion, and private financial-sector debt led the great binge."
btt
People on FR are now posting Kevin Phillips. Why don’t they just skip the post and get the stuff straight from “The Nation”? ;)
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