Now that President Obama has signalled his willingness to punish the Chinese for dumping on tires, a whole host of other industries are likely to file their own ‘copy-cat’ complaints.
Reuters says:
President Barack Obama’s decision to restrict tire imports from China after union workers complained of a surge could lead to copycat cases in areas such [...]

In 2002, the global economy was weak and equity markets around the world were at multi-year lows following the greatest equity bubble and bust in world history. Many policy makers including Alan Greenspan, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, feared a deflationary spiral of Great Depression proportions resulting from the stock market collapse.
To prevent such [...]

Chinese vice-premier Wang Qishan has been appointed to lead a taskforce to make the renminbi the currency of choice for trade settlements, especially with regional trading partners. HSBC economist Qu Hongbin believes this latest salvo in China’s intensifying efforts to ditch the dollar demonstrates the Chinese are moving sooner than most expect to internationalise their [...]

When the stimulus bill was being crafted, I wrote three posts lamenting the protectionist Buy American provision attached to the bill.

‘Buy American’ will translate into a 21st century Smoot-Hawley
The U.S. is exporting unemployment with ‘Buy America’
Canada is furious about U.S. protectonism

The last of these three demonstrated that the provision was needlessly creating lots of ill [...]

During the Great Depression, it was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which in hindsight is blamed for triggering a wave of protectionist actions globally.  Protectionism was a major contributor to the downward spiral that created depression.  So, have we avoided this kind of outcome this go around?
At this juncture, it is pretty unclear we have. Simmering [...]

This comes via Bloomberg:
Global central banks risk inflation, currency devaluation and a “big consolidation” in bond markets by pumping cash into their economies, the People’s Bank of China said in its quarterly monetary policy report.
The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England this year started quantitative easing, or printing money to buy government bonds, a [...]

After a good run-up in the last month, the Mexican Peso is getting crushed in the currency markets today.  How much of the pullback is a result of the news regarding Swine Flu and how much is technical, due to the prior run up, is hard to identify.  Nevertheless, the outbreak will have a negative [...]

This past week, I caught an article in Wirschaftswoche (WiWo), the German Business Week, which suggested that the South Koreans were very confident about their economy and had learned from the Asian Crisis.
Just today, the South Koreans released GDP numbers that many would find amazing, showing that the economy grew 0.1% in the first quarter [...]

Marshall Auerback here with a few thoughts about this economic cycle, external imbalances, fiscal stimulus, and current account deficits.
This is not the Great Depression. We are going to have “muddle through” here precisely because we lack the courage to deficit spend on the magnitude we did in World War II. We are spending too much [...]

I plan to visit Mexico early next month as I do at least one or twice every year. This year I question what awaits me as evidence that Mexico’s economy and civil order is imploding mount. The latest strike against Mexico comes in its now escalating trade war with the United States.