April 27, 2015
Yeah, that was a joke. However that would be the case if the paper was consistent. Its lead editorial today complained about the people arguing that currency rules should be included in a trade deal. It told readers:
“And, yes, the International Monetary Fund has developed criteria for currency manipulation — including prolonged current account surpluses and excessive foreign exchange reserve accumulation — that could, in theory, be incorporated into the agreement.
“The problem is that the definitions of these terms are subject to endless lawyerly disputation, and they could well be interpreted to rule out legitimate economic measures, including some — such as the Federal Reserve’s recent quantitative easing — that the United States itself might pursue. As Kemal Dervis of the Brookings Institution has argued, pretty much any aspect of macroeconomic policy could be construed to affect a country’s trade balance and, by extension, its exchange rate. It is therefore far better to keep such sensitive matters out of trade deals and leave them to existing, separate, diplomatic processes.”
Guess what? Almost any policy that we might put forward to improve the economy to help the economy can be seen as an unfair export subsidy. This list would include items such as vocational training to give workers more skills, improved infrastructure to facilitate the transportation of goods to ports, low interest loans (i.e. the export-import bank), implicit government backing for too big to fail banks (i.e. TARP), and publicly funded research like the $30 billion a year that finances the National Institutes of Health and provides many of the breakthroughs eventually harnessed by our drug companies.
Similarly, a wide range of consumer and environmental policies can be seen as restrictions on imports. And labor policies that applied to foreign investors can be seen as unfair takings under the TPP or TTIP. As the Post editorial says, “the definitions of these terms are subject to endless lawyerly disputation.”
If the Post’s editorial board were being consistent it would reject trade pacts in general as too complicated. But as we know, when it comes to trade policy, the Post cares little for consistency — or the facts.
Remember, this is the paper that claimed Mexico’s GDP had quadrupled between 1987 and 2007 in a lead editorial condemning the Democratic presidential candidates for pledging to renegotiate NAFTA. According to our good friends at the I.M.F, the actual increase was just over 83 percent.
One more point, the Post was upset at the fast-track critics for complaining about the trade deal’s secrecy. There is a very simple point here. President Obama could release a draft text of the deal indicating where issues are still being negotiated. The Post’s editors are probably too young to remember, but President George W. Bush did this back in 2003 before asking Congress to vote for fast-track authority on the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.
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