Sina Delenda Est

President Trump: ‘Ready to go’ with tariffs on all Chinese imports
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN 

President Trump in an interview that aired Friday said that he’s “ready to go” with $500 billion in tariffs on China after already slapping the country with a series of tariffs.
President Trump said in an interview with CNBC that the U.S. is “down a tremendous amount” in terms of trade with China saying that China “can’t match us because otherwise we’re always going to be behind the 8-ball.”
“I’m not doing this for politics. I’m doing this to do this right thing for our country. We have been ripped off by China for a long time and I told that to Xi Jinping,” President Trump said.
Bloomberg reported that about $500 billion worth of Chinese goods were imported into the U.S. last year.
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has been taken advantage of by China on trade.
The Trump administration imposed tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese products last month, which China quickly matched with tariffs on the same value of American goods.
The administration then announced that it would impose another series of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports.
China has promised to retaliate for the latest round of tariffs and has filed a challenge with the World Trade Organization.

President Trump eyes tariffs on up to $60 billion Chinese goods; tech, telecoms, apparel targeted

By David Lawder, Michael Martina

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California, U.S. March 13, 2018. 

WASHINGTON/BEIJING -- U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to impose tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports and will target the technology and telecommunications sectors, two people who had discussed the issue with the Trump administration said on Tuesday.
A third source who had direct knowledge of the administration’s thinking said the tariffs, associated with a “Section 301” intellectual property investigation, under the 1974 U.S. Trade Act begun in August last year, could come “in the very near future.”
While the tariffs would be chiefly targeted at information technology, consumer electronics and telecoms, they could be much broader and the list could eventually run to 100 products, this person said.
The White House declined to comment on the size or timing of any move.
Trump is targeting Chinese high technology companies to punish China for its investment policies that effectively force U.S. companies to give up their technology secrets in exchange for being allowed to operate in the country, as well as for other IP practices Washington considers unfair.
The Trump administration is also considering imposing investment restrictions on Chinese companies over and above the heightened national security restrictions, but details on these were not immediately known. 

A U.S. Treasury spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But lobbyists in Washington expressed concern that Trump’s ambitious tariff plan would also include other labor-intensive consumer goods sectors such as apparel, footwear and toys.

China runs a $375 billion trade surplus with the United States and when Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser visited Washington recently, the administration pressed him to come up with a way of reducing that number.
Trump came to office on a promise to shield American workers from imports and his first action as president was to pull the United States out of the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
His administration is in the midst of negotiations to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and last week announced the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
While the tariffs on steel and aluminum, announced last week by Trump, are viewed as relatively insignificant in terms of imports and exports, moves to target China directly risk a direct and harsh response from Beijing.
“If this is serious, the Chinese will retaliate. The key question is, does the U.S. retaliate against that retaliation,” said Derek Scissors, a China trade expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank.
That would spook stock markets, but Scissors said that the more serious the conflict became, the worse China’s position would become, due to the importance of its U.S. trade surplus.
“Their incentive to negotiate is to head us off from a major trade conflict.”

NOT BIG ENOUGH
The news website Politico earlier reported that the U.S. Trade Representative’s office had presented Trump with a package of $30 billion in tariffs last week, but Trump told aides that this was not high enough.
One Washington business source who had discussed the issue with the White House said the figure had now grown to about $60 billion, with a potentially wider array of products under consideration.
A second person, who is an industry lobbyist in Washington familiar with the administration’s thinking, said the process was being led by Peter Navarro, an eminent economist, and by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who also favors tariffs as a tool to rebalance trade.
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady stressed that Trump was serious about addressing the issue of intellectual property theft with China.
“He’s serious about calling their hand on this, and my understanding is they are looking at a broad array of options to do that,” Brady said.
U.S. business groups, while uneasy about triggering Chinese retaliation, have increasingly pressed Washington to take action on Beijing’s industrial policies, such as market access restrictions and the “Made in China 2025” plan, which aims to supplant foreign technologies with domestic ones.
Shortly after Trump took office, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a U.S. technology think tank whose board includes representatives from top companies such as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Google, and Intel, called for coordinated international pressure on Beijing.
While complaints about China’s abuse of intellectual property rights are not confined to the United States, Trump’s global steel and aluminum tariffs announced last week under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 complicate U.S. efforts to recruit allies to put pressure on China.
A senior European diplomat in Beijing said China would be relieved to see Europe and Washington at odds over the metals tariffs.
“China’s biggest worry has always been joint push-back from its major Western trading partners,” the diplomat said.
A China-based business source with knowledge of discussion among senior European officials said there had been a “clear effort” by the U.S. government over the past six months to introduce a coordinated approach to Chinese industrial policy, but that Trump’s metals tariffs had undermined European support.
“Senior Trump administration officials had directly approached European leaders at a senior level. There had been a willingness to do something together on China. That’s impossible right now. You can’t cooperate when you’re getting whacked around,” the person told Reuters.

Chinese Dumping

EU e-bike makers make complaint against Chinese imports
Reuters 

A fuel station for e-bikes is pictured in the historic city centre of the western German city of Koblenz, March 1, 2016. 

BRUSSELS -- European producers of electronic bikes (e-bikes) have filed a complaint with the European Commission against cheap Chinese e-bike imports, saying that they are sold in the bloc at excessively low prices with the help of unfair subsidies.
The European Bicycle Manufacturers Association (EBMA) lodged the complaint alleging dumping of e-bikes by Chinese companies which they say are flooding the market at prices below the cost of production.
The Commission has until late October to determine whether to start an investigation.
The EBMA is also preparing a related complaint alleging illegal subsidies and asking for registration of Chinese e-bike imports, which could allow eventual duties to be backdated.
Such an investigation would be the latest in a string of probes into Chinese exports ranging from solar panels to steel and could raise trade tensions with Beijing, particularly with a subsidy inquiry into the support provided by the Chinese state.
Bicycles have already been a flashpoint. 

The EU blamed China last December for scuppering a global environmental trade deal by insisting that bicycles be included as a tariff-free green product. 

Chinese conventional bicycles have been subject to EU anti-dumping duties since 1993.
The EBMA says more than 430,000 Chinese e-bikes were sold in European Union in 2016, a 40 percent increase on the previous year, and forecasts the figure will rise to around 800,000 in 2017.
EBMA secretary-general Moreno Fioravanti said Europeans buy some 20 million bicycles per year, of which about 10 percent are now e-bikes, with the potential to rise to a quarter within five years.
European companies had pioneered the pedal-assist technology that e-bikes use and had invested about 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) last year, he said, but was risking losing its industry to China.
“Today the European bikes are the best in the world and we have to invest every year to renew the range. The Chinese are getting the money from the government and the subsidies have an impact of 30, 40, even 50 percent of the price of the product,” Fioravanti said.
“You have subsidies, which generate overcapacity, which generate dumping,” he said.

Here's Why Donald Trump Is Right About China

Chinese imports are killing American innovation

By Chris Matthews

A vendor picks up a 100 yuan note above a newspaper featuring a photo of US president Donald Trump, at a newsstand in Beijing on November 10, 2016.

Once upon a time, it was de rigeur for U.S. politicians to boast of the prowess of the American worker. 

Donald Trump, in his policies at least, seems to be putting an end to that.
“We need not shrink from the challenge of the global economy,” then-President Bill Clinton said in his 1997 State of the Union Speech, when free trade was a much more popular idea than it is today. “After all, we have the best workers and the best products. In a truly open market, we can out-compete anyone, anywhere on Earth.”
Today, this kind of American exceptionalism is harder to justify. 

Many politicians have given up on it altogether. 

Trump gave a hint at the different approach they’d be taking to international economic competition when he met with executives of the heating and cooling firm Carrier. 

“I don’t want them moving out of the country without consequences,” Trump told the New York Times. 

Mike Pence added, contra Clinton, that “the free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing.”
A Republican Vice President arguing that the White House should interfere with the workings of the free market in order to protect American workers would have been unthinkable just five years ago. But there is increasing evidence that global trade doesn’t work the way that free market fundamentalists have always believed.
In a new working paper published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Pian Shu, and Gary Pisano come to the same conclusion. 

The paper finds that competition with Chinese exporters have had deleterious effects on American innovation. 

To do so, the authors looked at how import competition affects innovation in the United States by studying the effect of increased import competition on American manufacturing firms’ R&D spending and issuance of patents. 

“Our results suggest that the China trade shock reduces firm profitability in U.S. manufacturing, leading firms to contract operations along multiple margins of activity, including innovation.”
This is counter to the popular belief that while specific American workers may be harmed by free trade encouraging low-skilled jobs to move abroad, the American economy would benefit overall by increased competition because competition leads to more innovation and lower prices for consumers.
But this economics-101 conception of the global economy has long since stopped working for the American people, and the political class is finally catching on. 

Last month, the Pew Research Center published two sets of polling results that show that the plurality of Americans believe that “U.S. involvement in the global economy is a bad thing because it lowers wages and costs jobs in the U.S.” 

However, when scholars in international relations at major Universities were asked the same question, 9-in-10 said that it was a good thing because “it provides the U.S. with new markets and opportunities for growth.”

This likely shows the disconnect between the theoretical foundations of how international trade works and the practical and anecdotal effects of what average people see everyday. 

In theory, international trade makes everyone richer as countries shift production to goods and services they can produce most efficiently. 

But this increased wealth is of little consequence to average folks if it captured by the lucky few.
One of the more perceptive observations of the Donald Trump campaign was that the political and academic class in the United States had overlooked these effects, while many Americans have not.

Saving White Americans

Researchers have found a troubling new cause of death for middle-aged white Americans
By Max Ehrenfreund 

Containers sit in stacks at the Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai on Sept. 24.

White Americans without a college degree are becoming more likely to die in middle age, reversing decades of progress toward better health.
Researchers first noticed this worrisome trend last year. 

They pointed to increases in opioid abuse, obesity and suicide among the causes of death, but what caused these increases has remained something of a mystery.
This week, a pair of economists have advanced a new theory. 

They suggest that, for many workers, a major shift in the structure of the U.S. economy may have been fatal.
The researchers, Justin Pierce and Peter Schott, found evidence that trade with China has resulted in greater rates of suicide and poisonings (including fatal drug overdoses) after 2000, when Clinton and Republican lawmakers allowed a major increase in imports.
Pierce and Schott suggest that as competition with Chinese manufacturing forced U.S. factories to close, many of the Americans who were laid off never got their lives back together. 

Instead, they fell into depression or addiction. 

White adults, in particular, suffered from the change in policy.
Schott thinks that trade can have important economic benefits on the whole but that his results shows that policymakers need to do more to help those workers who are displaced.
“I’m in favor of free trade, but I’m also someone who believes that we should be honest about the consequences,” Schott said. 

“It doesn’t benefit everyone equally.”
The economists estimate that the increase in Chinese imports caused an additional 0.4 suicides per 100,000 residents in counties where local economies were vulnerable to competition, relative to the trend in suicide in those places before 2000 and compared with counties that were more insulated from trade with China.
The figure for poisonings was 1.3 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Pierce, who is on the staff of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, and Schott, an economist at Yale University.

The nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research published the findings in a working paper on Monday, during an uncertain moment for global commerce. 

President Donald Trump has promised to renegotiate trade deals and has threatened punitive tariffs on Chinese goods.
Schott calls on policymakers to do more to ensure that everyone shares in the gains from globalization.

In 1930, the Smoot-Hawley legislation placed onerous tariffs on imported goods from China and elsewhere. 

This situation offered more implicit protection to the U.S. industries whose competitors confronted the steepest rates, including manufacturers of plastic bottles. 

Textile mills — especially those producing knit fabric and lace — also benefited.
Lawmakers gradually weakened those tariffs over time, and those on Chinese goods had become minimal by the end of the century. 

U.S. industries still enjoyed implicit protection because there was always a possibility that lawmakers would allow those tariffs to revert to the high levels set in 1930. 

Investors looking to put money into Chinese factories had no assurance that they would be able to continue producing goods for the U.S. market.
But in 2000, Clinton and Congress made the lower tariffs permanent, Pierce and Schott wrote, a decision that most negatively affected the industries that had the highest tariffs under Smoot-Hawley.

The two economists examined records of deaths compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comparing data from counties where the local economy was more reliant on those favored industries with data from counties where other sectors were more economically important.
The increase in suicide attributed to the increase in imports was equivalent to 4 percent of the national average. 

For poisonings including overdoses, the increase was about 28 percent of the national average.
The researchers also considered how trade with China affected deaths from chronic liver failure from alcohol. 

The results were ambiguous, possibly because it can be many years before diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver become fatal.
The opening with China was far more consequential for the U.S. labor market than previous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Employment in domestic manufacturing, which had been declining only gradually, plummeted after 2000.
Other economists have estimated that Chinese imports put between 2 million and 2.4 million Americans out of work. 

The financial crisis in 2008 and the more minor recession in 2000 added to the decline.
On the other hand, Pierce and Schott found evidence that exposure to Chinese competition significantly reduced the number of heart attacks, possibly because fewer people were doing strenuous labor.
On average, 2.7 fewer people died of heart attacks per 100,000 residents in the typical county with a vulnerable economy, compared with the prior trend in those counties and relative to counties that were more insulated economically.
Overall, the two economists found, the increase in Chinese imports caused an additional 13.8 fatalities from internal causes for every 100,000 residents in negatively affected counties. 

For external causes, the increase in the rate was 3.3 deaths.