that's cause they are waiting for it to bite them in the azz...
Posted on 11/23/2013 7:25:46 AM PST by IbJensen
You have to understand that Free Trade is a religion taught in EVERY business school in the country.
The Chinese have sold off a small amount of US debt over the last two years. They are down from their peak holdings....Yes this is known but now they are trumpeting it I guess
Doesn't sound very suicidal to me.
I blame the unions because of the extremely fat cats at the head of each. With each humongous rise in wages and benefits inflation rose to meet those raises.
I also blame the CEO imbeciles who treated the unions as children and caved in each and every time to the demands.
A great example of this was the UAW and GM at the time that the communist Walter Reuther was killed in a plane crash on his way to the UAW resort in Michigan. Leonard Woodcock became his replacement. The auto contract was up for negotiations in order to renew. GM execs decided that since they’d have to deal with Woodcock they needed to make him look good, so they caved very quickly and granted everything.
So, you see both sides are to blame, but the big problem now is how to roll these excesses back.
You are not paying attention: unions workers account for only 10% of the manufacturing workforce. You are fighting the last war...
Yeah, the real question is why they chose to trumpet/make official what they were already doing for sometime.
imho because of sharply rising oil production — & slowly falling US demand for oil—the pressure is on the dollar to rise. The QE’s are supplying downward pressure on the dollar—which keeps the dollar relatively stable —but whenever the QE’s come off — the dollar will rise sharply.
That means the value of China’s dollar reserves rises.
How can it be? Obama is on track to increase the federal debt by 87% by 2016...
Obama is on track to increase the federal debt by 87% by 2016....
..........
well yes , since the beginning of his term.
debt for fy2013 at 680 billion was still astronomical by historical standards. But the decline in the deficit from the year before was also astronomical by historical standards.
Just as stock market prices are valuations of future earnings — so also is the value of the dollar a valuation of the future economy—and the future of federal tax receipts — of the USA.
Both are looking very rosy.
You just can’t underestimate how profoundly significant for the USA the oil and gas fracking revolution is.(Hint, the USA has been steadily defunded since the 1970’s. We are in the very first years of a major major decades long turn around)
The Chinese essentially quit lending the US money several years ago; if anything, they’re lending us maybe $100 billion per year.
Regarding the Federal deficit - the national debt a month ago (after the latest budgetary can-kick) was $900 billion higher than it was the same date a year earlier.
Lastly, the last time the Federal government balanced its budget (on a fiscal-year basis) was during the Eisenhower administration. It nearly balanced one time in the late 1990’s, but has run a deficit EVERY SINGLE YEAR since about 1957.
How long can it go on? If as much money goes into the stock market as goes out (a simplification I know) the feds collect the capital gains taxes and the stock market stays stable. It seems that interest rates on savings would have to stay near zero to keep that balance, so the feds have to keep printing money.
Can this be a new normal which can be stabilized?
You forgot the part where all the other countries put tariffs on anything we export, like food, chemicals, natural gas, heavy equipment etc etc...
You seem to think American would lose in such a face-off.
America imports a massive amount of production, that other countries make.
Not the other way around.
We have given and sold American manufacturing out from under our very own selves.
America makes virtually nothing now.
Bring back American jobs. If it takes a trade war to get things balanced back out again.
I say let’s start. Now.
that's cause they are waiting for it to bite them in the azz...
Because trade wars never lead to real wars right?
Well we’re being railroaded right now.
What exists now, will lead to a real war.
We do not stand up for American industry. Ever.
A trade war is a real war. And we are not fighting.
Probably so. Lolly gagging along in ‘I wonder’ mode.
All of the Dubai Airshow orders were for civilian airliners and the engines for them.
We have a large number of jobs available in this country right now.
What we don't have is a workforce trained and willing to do them.
We have idiot "guidance counselors" pushing kids into worthless four year degrees along with parents doing the same thing.
A two year degree in a technical college can get one far further ahead in many cases.
I partially agree with you. Just look at what Obama has “accomplished” in the last two years (leaving aside his record prior to that). It wipes away any advantage most U.S. manufacturers would gain from an across the board 10% tariff.
My own experience in manufacturing is that ON AVERAGE you’d need 50 to 100% tariffs to truly level the playing field. I know some will say that can’t be, but if you take a truly honest look at what it would take to build an “All American” car from the minerals & such up to a finished product, even assuming the components manufacturers were in place in the US and running large volumes, well, that’s how it works out.
Another consideration is that to obtain the production efficiencies needed to even have a chance at competing, you have to highly automate, which means you don’t generate many jobs. Indeed there is much discussion of this conundrum, including here on FR. I’ll be the first to agree that we need to bring a lot of manufacturing back to the US, even if some here, like CNN, would disagree with me on how to accomplish that. The problem for employment is that the net result is few jobs added.
Also one must keep in mind that in many cases the most effective foreign manufacturers are themselves highly automated, in some cases with equipment and facilities that are jaw dropping. If you doubt this, go visit a major cold forged parts plant. The US has NEVER had plants anything like those, to produce such parts.
The real problem with tariffs, though, is that they are essentially a hidden tax.
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