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So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home.
By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Immigration, Trade, World
From Bloomberg, Johnathan Weil reports a US prosecutor says a stolen Goldman Sachs computer program capable of manipulating global markets may fall into the wrong hands (wrong being other than the world’s most powerful investment bank). About the first of this month Goldman notified authorities that former employee Sergey Aleynikov, not content with post-its and [...]
It’s a bit amazing in these days of burgeoning state control of the economy, but you still hear politicians–the same ones who foisted corporate-welfare stimulus and bailout plans on us–cursing protectionism and singing odes to free trade.
To be fair, many free-trade defenders these days are real laissez-faire types fighting to prevent yet another assault on [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Economics, Trade, libertarianism
Just as the problems of filling several vacancies to the U.S. Senate highlighted the need to repeal the 17th Amendment, so too has President Obama’s failure to find someone, anyone, to be Secretary of Commerce highlights the utter worthlessness of the entire department.
The Commerce Department, originally known as Commerce and Labor, is a Progressive era [...]
(And not tears of laughter) The mobility of labor is becoming the forced march of labor: IBM offers help to displaced workers.
Filed under: Economics, Immigration, Trade, libertarianism
With his public approval where Harry Truman’s stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday.
And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics — and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined his presidency.
He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Politics, Trade
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”
Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout to [...]
Who killed the U.S. auto industry?
To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUV’s no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans, and Koreans prepared and built for the future.
I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the [...]
Understandably, Republicans are seething.
When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.
The Dow [...]
The world food crisis is not all bad news, the Guardian reports. In Afghanistan, poppy farmers are switching to wheat crops in response to soaring food costs. Less heroin, more food: seems to be a good example of market forces at work.
America and Britain have spent a lot of money and energy trying to move [...]
Filed under: Trade