Mitt Romney’s economics: Flip back please

The probable Republican nominee should stop pandering to the left on China and to the right on taxes

Apr 21st 2012 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip]

TO UNDERSTAND why Mitt Romney has triumphed over his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, look no further than March’s disappointing job numbers. With growth fragile and petrol prices soaring, the economy is Barack Obama’s gaping weak spot, and Republican primary voters have backed the candidate best equipped to exploit it.

Yet it is very far from clear what they are getting. Blame that, in part, on a nominating contest that repeatedly veered into irrelevancies. But blame the candidate, too. In the past year Mr Romney’s views have metamorphosed worryingly as he has tried to protect his flank against a succession of conservative challengers. It is no exaggeration to say that there are now two Romneys when it comes to economics (see article).

China’s economy and the WTO: All change

In two articles, we examine how China has been altered by its entry into the WTO ten years ago. First, the economy.

[By Greg Ip and The Economist's Asia Economics Editor] THE World Trade Organisation (WTO), like many clubs, denies patrons the right of automatic readmission. Having quit the organisation’s predecessor shortly after the Communist revolution of 1949, China had to wait 15 long years to gain entry after reapplying in the 1980s. The doors finally opened on December 11th 2001, ten years ago this week.

The price of re-entry was as steep as the wait was long. China had to relax over 7,000 tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers. Some feared that foreign competition would uproot farmers and upend rusty state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as to some extent it did. But China, overall, has enjoyed one of the best decades in global economic history. Its dollar GDP has quadrupled, its exports almost quintupled.

Trade with China: And now, protectionism

America’s latest anti-China bill tackles a problem already being solved

Oct 15th 2011 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip] THE global economy is sicker than a man with a bellyful of bad oysters. The last thing it needs now is a trade war. Yet on October 11th America’s Senate passed the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act, which would allow any “fundamentally misaligned” currency to be labelled a subsidy subject to countervailing duties. No prizes for guessing which large Asian nation the senators have in mind.

Variants of this bill have been introduced regularly since 2003; all have failed. But this time may be different: anti-China sentiment in both parties has grown. Republican leaders have so far resisted holding a vote on a similar bill in the House of Representatives and look unlikely to change their minds; but if they do, the bill would almost certainly pass.

It may seem contradictory that the Senate is threatening to raise barriers to trade with China even as it has just passed bilateral trade pacts with Colombia, South Korea and Panama. But those treaties were first signed four to five years ago. Public support for free trade has been withering for a decade, tracking the decline in middle-class American manufacturing jobs. The main cause of that decline is rising productivity, which lets factories produce more stuff with fewer workers, but cheap Chinese imports have also been a factor (seearticle). America’s resentment of China has grown as its economy sputters while China’s has galloped ahead. Barack Obama has pinned his hopes for recovery on a doubling of exports, a goal that China’s many barriers to trade, from discriminatory government procurement to the undervalued yuan, impede.

America has legitimate beefs with China, but this bill is the wrong way to address them.

Free trade and the yuan: One step forward, one back

As trade deals head towards approval, a backlash grows against China

Oct 8th 2011 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition

 [Greg Ip] THIS was supposed to be a good week for American trade policy. On October 3rd Barack Obama submitted three long-stalled trade agreements to Congress for ratification. Republican and Democratic leaders promised speedy passage. If all goes as planned, the pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea could be ratified in time for a state visit on October 13th by Lee Myung-bak, the Korean president.

But that advance for trade was tempered by a revival of protectionism against China.

Central banking and the crisis: Emergency manoeuvres

With developed economies in dire straits, central bankers have taken the tiller. Not all of them are happy about that.

Aug 13th 2011 | from the print edition

[Greg Ip]

COMETH the hour, cometh the central bankers. On August 8th the European Central Bank (ECB) began buying Italian and Spanish bonds in an effort to stop the sovereign-debt crisis from crippling two of the continent’s largest economies. And a day later America’s Federal Reserve made an unprecedented commitment to keeping interest rates at more or less zero for two more years to keep a stalling economy out of recession.

In both cases the dramatic steps were taken in the face of political failures to get to the heart of the problems at hand. The fact that they took both banks well outside their normal zones of operation was underscored by the internal dissent both moves faced, dissent rarely seen in the consensus-driven world of central banking.

The initial market reaction was positive, at least on one side of the Atlantic. Yields on Italian and Spanish bonds fell sharply relative to Germany’s. In America Treasury yields fell and stocks rose—but not for long, as equity markets fell again on August 10th. No one should see this as a fundamental turnaround. The ECB’s earlier bond-buying hasn’t saved smaller countries from punitively high government-bond yields; the Fed’s previous interventions haven’t spurred a robust recovery. The big issues of America’s stagnant economy and Europe’s debt crisis remain in the hands of elected politicians who still seem inadequate to the task. But at least central banks have shown themselves ready and able to act.

The entire article is linked here.

US-China trade relations: Speak less softly, carry a stick

The Obama administration’s patience with China wears thin

Sep 23rd 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC

 [Greg Ip] CHINESE officials like to lecture their American counterparts that, when it comes to loosening their tightly controlled currency, pressure is counterproductive. Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, has resisted direct confrontation with China over the yuan’s value. Like his predecessors, he worries that overt pressure would undermine advocates of reform inside China, principally the People’s Bank of China, and erode co-operation on other issues such as Iran and North Korea. Read the article on economist.com

The truth hurts: Will the Treasury call China a currency manipulator?

 

Mar 31st 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

[Greg Ip] TO MOST people, to say that China holds down the value of its currency to boost its exports is to state the obvious. Not, though, to America’s Treasury Department. By law it must report twice a year on which countries fiddle their exchange rates at the world’s expense. China was last fingered in 1994. Ever since then, the Treasury has concluded that the designation would do more harm than good. Speculation is growing that it may decide differently in its next report, due on April 15th.

The tyre wars: Playing with fire

Sep 17th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC AND BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

By succumbing to domestic pressures, America has started an alarming trade row with China

Illustration by KAL

 

[GREG IP and The Economist's Beijing Correspondent] IN RAW economic terms Barack Obama’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese tyres hardly registers. The number of jobs affected is barely a rounding error in measurements of the mighty American workforce. The cost to consumers is also slight. But in geopolitical terms, it is a whopper.