Thoughts About the Trans-Pacific Partnership
The leak of the investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has confirmed that it’s as bad as critics said it was.
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Gaius Publius: Ron Wyden, Progressives and the TPP
Are progressives willing to attack Ron Wyden on TPP?
Read more...Major American Allies Ignore U.S. Pleas and Join China’s Development Bank
China’s development bank is a salvo at America’s dollar-driven financial hegemony. The US has good reason to worry about its apparent appeal.
Read more...Is Momentum Building in Japan Towards Signing the TransPacific Partnership?
US sources claim that Japan is finally warming to the TransPacific Partnership. True or not?
Read more...Gaius Publius: Astroturf “Progressive” Support for the TPP – Meet “270 Solutions”
It’s become routine to expose some of the supposedly organic proposals that come out of the Tea Party as actually sponsored by the Koch Brothers and other big corporate interests. We didn’t want to leave Democrats out in the cold in the astroturfing game. Gaius Publius discusses one ecosystem: a consulting firm, “270 Strategies” and one of its phony creations, the Progressive Coalition for American Jobs.
Read more...Did Ireland’s 12.5 Percent Corporate Tax Rate Create the Celtic Tiger?
Offshore banking and tax haven expert Nicholas Shaxson has launched a new blog, Fools’ Gold, to look at issues of ‘competitiveness’ and so-called ‘competition’ between nations. We’ve often taken issue with that policy goal, since it gives precedence to crushing labor as a way of lowering product prices to stoke exports. This approach is dubious for anything other than small economies, since all countries cannot be net exporters. Undue focus on exports as a driver of growth results in increasing international friction, such as the currency wars that are underway now. Moreover, as we have discussed separately, trade liberalization has gone hand in hand with liberalization of capital flows, in no small measure due to US efforts to make the world safe for what were then US investment banks. Yet Carmen Reinhardt and Ken Rogoff pointed out in their study of financial crises, higher levels of international capital flows are associated with more frequent and severe financial crises.
In addition, lowering wage rates reduces domestic demand. In countries like the US, where the domestic economy is much larger than the export sector, lowering internal demand to stoke exports is misguided.
Here we look at a first case study, the real reasons behind the growth and meltdown of the famed Celtic tiger, Ireland.
Read more...Look Who is Selling the TransPacific Partnership
Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.
Read more...Mapley Fights Back: How the Scammers Behind Virgin Gold Mining Corporation Bit Off More Than They Could Chew (VIII)
It’s high time I updated the APGMI part of the saga of Virgin Gold Mining Corporation. Here’s a round-up of the relevant parts of this sprawling series.
Read more...HSBC’s Money Laundering Nightmare (1): Mossack Fonseca
HSBC’s top brass have “no idea” about Mossack Fonseca. Here’s a primer.
Read more...The Administration’s Dishonest Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Attack on Secret Investor Arbitration Panels in Trade Deals
Elizabeth Warren is clearly getting on the Administration’s nerves.
Read more...Nurses Unite to Stop TransPacific Partnership Fast Track
In case you haven’t noticed, nurses unions have emerged as a particularly powerful and credible labor/lobbying group. So it’s encouraging to see them use their bully pulpit to rally voters to contact their Congresscritters and voice opposition to the upcoming vote on so-called fast track authority for the TransPacific Partnership. I’m heartened to see, in the Real News Network video below, that the nurses’ representative puts forward compact, factually sound arguments as to why this misnamed “trade deal” is a sop to major corporations at the expense of citizens.
Read more...Bond Star Sir Roger Moore, Three Million Phantom Geese in China, and a New Zealand Financial Services Provider
Bond Star Sir Roger Moore, Three Million Phantom Geese in China, and a New Zealand Financial Services Provider
Read more...Mathew D. Rose: Greece – Dead Man Walking
Rose focuses on an issue that reader Swedish Lex and other have pointed out: the heavy-handed actions of Germany in the tempestuous negotiations between the Eurozone and Greece have wound up being a major own goal.
But the bigger issue that Rose raises is that last week’s ugly negotiations, in combination with the fiasco in Ukraine, is exposing Germany as a lousy hegemon, which he argues is producing a political crisis in Germany and fracture lines in Europe.
Read more...Gaius Publius: Tobacco Deaths, TPP and the “Trade” Courts
Obama’s pending trade deals, the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, have few fans at Naked Capitalism. But we are always looking for ways for like-minded readers to to alert friends and colleagues to the dangers of the proposed pacts and hopefully take action against them. This post gives concrete, accessible examples of some of the uses made of investor-state dispute settlement panels, which Gaius calls trade courts (even though they are actually secret arbitration panels) by Big Tobacco.
Read more...TransPacific Partnership: Fast Track to Financial Instability
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama said he would submit a bill to Congress that would grant him the fast track authority to finalize the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade pact with Pacific Rim countries such as Japan, Malaysia, Peru, and Chile. While free trade has brought benefits in the past, tariffs in the world economy are at an all time low and new deals like the TPP offer few new gains in terms of growth and jobs for the American people. And the TPP in particular comes at unacceptably high cost.
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