On December 12, the United States Trade Representative announced plans to hike the tariffs on imports of certain European products as a result of the seemingly endless Boeing/Airbus dispute. Capitol Hill was immediately inundated with the usual panoply of hyperbolic claims that tariffs spell doom for {fill in the blank} industry on the target list.…

If you are struggling to understand the rise of economic populism in the United States, and the resulting chasm between populists and elites, then Matt Stoller’s new book Goliath will enlighten you. Goliath is focused on antitrust, but it tells a much broader story of the way the intelligentsia has been led, through a combination…

We’ve talked about one loophole in NAFTA called “de minimis.”  In addition to rules of origin that already allow a certain amount of content originating from outside the region, the original NAFTA contains a loophole that allows an extra 7% on top of it.  The Trump Administration, in a position completely at odds with its China…

The recent furor over the NBA, South Park, and the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party is giving the average American a much better understanding of Chinese government authoritarianism in action. Until now, the discussion about the relationship between China and the United States had been dominated by pearl-clutching over how much more dog…

The following is an executive summary of a paper submitted to the Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance Conference A New Deal for a New Century: Making Our Economy Work for All.  Papers for the conference, including the full version of the summary below, can be found here.   Too often, the debate over trade devolves into tribalist…

Typically, trade agreement marketers rely on gains to GDP to explain why the agreements are worth doing. (Of course, in 2016 the U.S. International Trade Commission concluded that all these bilateral and regional trade agreements combined added a mere .2% per year to GDP.) Herein lies the conundrum: the existing NAFTA already provides duty-free treatment among…

On June 6, Inside Cybersecurity had a webinar of government and American industry voices to discuss Huawei, 5G, and cybersecurity.  The panelists’ main concern is the myriad ways hostile actors, including state actors, can exploit supply chains to engage in nefarious activities. Huawei, which has a prominent position in the race to 5G thanks to Chinese government…

Who said the following: many . . . have focused in particular on enforcement of labor and environmental provisions    . . . .   I am pleased that we obtained strong provisions in those areas, and I agree that they should be fully and effectively enforced so that our companies can compete based on…

According to Politico, a “coalition of free-market advocacy, business and nonprofit groups is urging the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee to press forward on new legislation curbing the president’s tariff authority.” Ah, the siren song of the free market.  But does anyone really think the global trading system is characterized by “free” markets?  A…

Donald Trump campaigned in part on the flaws in the auto rules of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Much of his renegotiation of NAFTA has focused on tightening up those rules.  As this paper explains, he can rightly claim some credit for strengthening them. But there are nevertheless questions about whether those rules will work the way…

According to a recent poll, a novice politician, J.D. Scholten, is giving long-standing incumbent Steve King a run for his money in Iowa, trailing King by one percentage point.  How is he doing it?  One of the issues Scholten is raising is the effect of corporate concentration on farmers.  Senator Cory Booker joined Scholten at an…

To situate the ongoing debate over trade, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways from Judith Stein’s book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Stein traces the evolution of American trade policy from Nixon to Clinton, and in particular she identifies choices that were made, across successive…

The Op-Ed can be found here.

There isn’t one. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the pain didn’t start when the United States imposed tariffs on our trading partners.  The pain started much earlier.  When, exactly, doesn’t necessarily matter, though we can focus on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its subsequent skirting of the rules, the WTO’s insistence on…

As the Trump Administration continues to borrow the Democratic message that globalization has left American manufacturing workers behind, some of our trade partners have chosen to retaliate by targeting American agricultural workers.  As we rightly focus on whether our farmers will be hurt, however, it is important to recall the degree to which our trade agreements…

For many Americans, the 1950s were the golden age of American history. When asked when America was great, Donald Trump pointed to the post-war era of the 1940s and 1950s.  America was the world’s unquestioned economic, political, and military power. The business of America was business. The American economy was humming as never before. The…

A previous blog explained that: the U.S. willingness to be the market of last resort has been a component critical to the functioning of the global trading system; the U.S. ability to serve as the market of last resort has been compromised by WTO overreach; and no other WTO Member seems to be willing to shoulder…

The last blog pierced the China meme – the premise that we need to do trade deals with countries in order to keep China at bay.  But if trade deals with other countries aren’t the way to deal with competitive threats from China, what is? Part of the problem is that trade people look at…

Is short-termism on its way out? Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has posited as much, in the wake of the departure of one CEO after another from White House advisory councils after the Charlottesville protests. He argues that this event is likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution…

The debate over trade policy seems to lead to only two possible views:  on one side, trade is responsible for the decline of the American middle class; on the other, trade is always beneficial, regardless of the rules.  Each side has a pejorative label for the other, so that we live in a world where…