You would never give away your business after years of creating value. You would also never purposefully devalue your life’s savings. Right?
When I was studying business and finance in the early 90’s at Babson College “Globalization” was the future. Where has that gotten us? Into a load of trouble.
Countries like China manipulate their currency, and central banks the world over are in a mad race to the bottom. In what “globalized” world can the U.S. compete if it doesn’t reflate the dollar?
No politician in Washington understands this cold hard fact and what it will take to right a wrong. As Pat Buchanan explains:
“If we don’t like the way the global economy works,” says Paul Ryan, “then we have to get out there and change it.”
No, we don’t. The great and justified complaint against China and Japan, who have run the largest trade surpluses at our expense, is that they are “currency manipulators.”
Correct. But the way to deal with currency manipulators is to rob them of the benefits of their undervalued currencies by slapping tariffs on goods they send to the United States.
And if the WTO says you can’t do that, give the WTO the answer Theodore Roosevelt would have given them.
Instead of wringing our hands over income inequality and wage stagnation, why don’t we turn these trade deficits into trade surpluses, as did the generations of Lincoln and McKinley, and T. R. and Cal Coolidge?
