When Jim Rogers taught classes at Columbia, he liked to tell students that the US had a proud history of implementing capital controls, and warned them against going on the merry assumption that it would ever and always be easy to make cross-border investments. For instance, taxes on foreign securities transactins are a soft form […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns I have to admit to hyping the debate now swirling about protectionism. I believe that tariffs are not a very good solution to a trade problem as they are likely to result in retaliation and/or escalation. Moreover, they end up protecting small groups at the expense of higher […]
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Read more...It would be better if we were not proven correct on this one, but when the US imposed stiff tariffs on imported tires from China late on Friday, we noted, “This could get interesting in a bad way.” The Chinese responded quickly over the weekend to announce they were investigating US auto parts and chicken, […]
Read more...The US tonight imposed steep tariffs on tires, a move directed against Chinese imports. From the Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration will put steep import duties on Chinese passenger and light truck tires, responding to what the U.S. International Trade Commission determined to be a surge of Chinese tire exports that has rocked the […]
Read more...When trade volumes tanked in the later part of 2008, quite a few observers expected a rise in protectionism. We haven’t seen a Smoot-Hawley analogue, a wide ranging measure that elicits retaliation. But that does not prevent policy makers from more targeted forms of gamesmanship. Trade has retreated from front-burner coverage due to the modest […]
Read more...While the G-20 agreement to move forward with a coordinated approach to bank capital rules and employee incentive payments is progress, it is important to recognize that what took place was effectively an apple pie and motherhood statement. The one stake in the ground was the commitment to make Tier 1 Capital a key metric. […]
Read more...Earlier this week, on the eve of a G-20 meeting, some European ministers were not only threatening to implement tough restrictions on the financial services industry, but they also asserted that the G20 was largely in alignment. That did not seem credible, particularly given the US propensity to talk tough and do very little on […]
Read more...From derivatives expert Satyajit Das of Traders, Guns & Money fame: In the 1980s, the Japanese were taking over the world. In the 1990s, it was going to be an ‘Asian’ century. These days the pundits are betting on the ‘Chinese Age’. Like all such glib predictions, despite their superficial appeal, they mask complex undercurrents […]
Read more...It must be lonely being a China bear….particularly for those dubious about its longer term prospects, as opposed to those who might simply think its stock market is a bit ahead of itself even after its recent correction. Vitaliy Katsenelson, in an article at MorningStar, beings almost sounding a tad persecuted before he warms up […]
Read more...Conspiracy theorists will have to wait until the article described in Inside Science is published to determine whether it delivers on its claims. It purports to analyze stock holding across 48 countries and alleges they are held in very few hands. But the work was done by physicists, which means they may not have understood […]
Read more...Some investors see the Baltic Dry Index, a proxy for the shipping rates for dry bulk cargoes, as an indicator of international trade activity. BDI is admittedly noisy, and so needs to be interpreted along with other information. Chinese imports have been a driving factor in commodities demand, which drives the BDI. The price of […]
Read more...This idea of China being ahead of the game in anything environment protection related probably strikes readers as ironic, given reports of extensive industrial pollution, such as air pollution on a scale that is changing weather patterns, large scale lead poisoning, and cadmium in the soil. As Forbes commented recently, “China: Where Poisoning People Is […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a good piece up at the Telegraph on an issue that appears not to have gotten the attention it merits, namely, the level of underutlization of capacity and the risk it poses to anything dimly resembling recovery. Evans-Pritchard brings up a related topic, that deflation is a bigger issue that most commentators […]
Read more...It was conventional wisdom in the US and UK financial press that Europe was dong a hopelessly bad job of responding to the economic downturn, that it needed to do vastly more in the way of fiscal stimulus, that it was consigning its citizens to continued recession, and the Te Germans in particular were to […]
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