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Globalization and Trade

The Washington Post-President Obama TPP-Challenge

It's hard to resist a good challenge and the Washington Post gave us one this morning in an editorial pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The editorial criticized TPP opponents and praised President Obama for continuing to push the deal. It tells readers:

"Mr. Obama refused to back down on the merits of the issues, noting that other countries, not the United States, would do most of the market-opening under the TPP and challenging opponents to explain how 'existing trading rules are better for issues like labor rights and environmental rights than they would be if we got TPP passed.'"

Okay, here's how we are better off with existing trade rules than the largely unenforceable provisions on labor and environmental standards in the TPP.

1) The TPP creates an extra-judicial process (investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals) whereby foreign investors can sue governments for imposing environmental, health and safety, and even labor regulations. Under the TPP, these tribunals are supposed to follow the far-right wing doctrine of compensating for regulatory takings. This means, for example, that if a state or county restricts fracking for environmental reasons, they would have to compensate a foreign company for profits that it lost as a result of not being allowed to frack or the additional expense resulting from the standards imposed. The ISDS tribunals are not bound by precedent, nor are their decisions subject to appeal.

2) The TPP imposes stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. These protectionist measures are likely to do far more to raise barriers to trade (patent and copyright monopolies are interventions in the free market, even if the Washington Post likes them) than the other measures in the TPP do to reduce them. In addition to the enormous economic distortions associated with barriers that are often equivalent to tariffs of 1000 percent or even 10,000 percent (e.g. raising the price of a patented drug to 100 times the generic price), TPP rules may make it more difficult for millions of people to get essential medicines.

CEPR / August 04, 2016

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Thomas Friedman Gives Hillary Clinton Economic Advice, Gets Confused

Many folks remember Thomas Friedman as the person who argued that Germany would insist that Greeks work less as a condition of getting new loans. They may also remember him as the person who doesn't know that in a free market, when an item is in short supply, the price is supposed to rise. This is why he can continually complains about shortages of skilled labor even though the pay of skilled workers is not rising.

Economics may not be Friedman's strong suit, but he is back at it again today complaining that Hillary Clinton doesn't have an economic growth strategy. He notes that she is promoting infrastructure investment, both as a way to generate demand and also provide a basis for further growth, but then argues that her pledge to give small businesses easier access to credit will come up short:

"To do that, though, would run smack into the anti-bank sentiment of the Democratic Party, since small community banks provide about half the loans to small businesses, and it is precisely those banks that have been most choked by the post-2008 regulations. We need to prevent recklessness, not risk-taking."

Okay, so Thomas Friedman is arguing that the big problem facing small businesses is that they can't get credit, and the main reason for that is those nasty Dodd-Frank regulations that are handcuffing community bankers. That's an interesting argument. Let's see if that fits what the small businesses themselves say.

The National Federal of Independent Businesses has been surveying small businesses for more than thirty years. Here's the latest statement on credit conditions from its June report:

CEPR / August 03, 2016

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Robert Samuelson and the Second Great Depression Crap

Hey folks, I saved you all from a Martian invasion, you really should be thankful. And Robert Samuelson says we were saved from a second Great Depression by the actions of the Federal Reserve Board. Yes, both claims are lies, but Samuelson's lie is more transparent than my lie.

The point here is a simple one, we know how to get out a depression. It's called "spending money." We got out of the last Great Depression by spending lots of money on fighting World War II. But guess what, the economy doesn't care what we spend money on, it responds in the same way. So if we instead had spent 20 percent of GDP on building highways, housing, hospitals, and providing education and child care it also would have led to double-digit economic growth and below 3.0 percent unemployment.

So anyone who claims that we risked a second Great Depression if the Fed and the Treasury Department had not saved the Wall Street banks is saying that the politicians in Washington are too brain dead to figure out how to spend money even when the alternative is double-digit unemployment. Note that tax cuts count in this story too. So the second Great Depression argument is that the Democrats and Republicans could not possibly figure out a mix of tax cuts and spending that would provide a large boost of demand to the economy.

I will confess to not having a great deal of respect for most politicians, but I have seen many of them tie their shoes. I find it more than a bit far-fetched to claim that they would not ever (a second Great Depression implies years of double-digit unemployment, not just a short downturn) figure out that they need to agree to a package of tax cuts and spending to boost the economy.

Anyhow, this proposition is at the core of the second Great Depression claim, so if you don't think that the members of Congress are complete morons, then you can't believe the second Great Depression story. The point is important because in the fall of 2008 we had the option to clean out the Wall Street cesspool in one fell swoop by allowing the market to work its magic. Most, if not all, of the major Wall Street banks would be out of business.

CEPR / August 01, 2016