posted 12-29-2003 11:20 AM            

How serious is America's trade crisis? The best way of framing the answer is that no great power since the last days of the Ottoman Empire has tried to project so much power abroad from such a weak economic base at home.

By Eamonn Fingleton.

With the announcement of a worse-than-expected $41.3 billion U.S. September trade deficit last week, the scene is being set for a major trade crisis. Certainly the trend is little short of disastrous and, all wishful thinking in the Bush administration to the contrary, there is virtually no hope of a turnaround before the 2004 election.

The new figures mean that in September alone the United States incurred a larger deficit than in the entire year of 1992 (which, as President Bush is well aware, was the last year of his father's administration). The U.S. goods-and-services trade deficit is on track to top $515 billion for 2003. This will represent an increase of nearly 20 percent on the record 2002 total and will be more than triple that of 1998 (which was already a disturbingly large record).

The new figures confirm that the U.S. current account deficit this year will top the psychologically important level of 5 percent of GDP. This will be the worst performance since American economic statistics were first compiled in the nineteenth century. By comparison, the notorious U.S. trade crisis of 1971-72, so well remembered by older Americans, was a mere blip. The U.S. trade deficit in 1972, at 0.5 percent of GDP, was less than one-tenth of the current level. Yet it was the prospect of a "disastrous" trade deficit in 1972 that forced President Nixon into a humiliating devaluation that severed the erstwhile "mighty" dollar's historic link with gold.

By all world standards, America's trade deficits are stunningly unsustainable. We have to go back to Italy in 1924 to find a major nation that, in percentage terms, has run a larger peacetime trade deficit. The full significance of this is that Italy in 1924 was a true economic basket case -- so much so that in January 1925, Mussolini seized dictatorial powers.

Of course, in recent years the consensus both on Wall Street and in the media has been that the trade deficits "don't matter." The economic thinking underlying this conclusion is as facile as the profits-don't-matter ethos that created the disastrous late 1990s bubble in dot.com stocks.

Why does trade matter? For a start the worsening trend has obvious and politically explosive implications for American jobs. True, most displaced workers eventually find new jobs but these are rarely as well paid.

Even if policymakers think they can continue to ride roughshod over the legitimate concerns of American workers, they will eventually be jolted out of their insouciance by a force they cannot ignore: money. The point is that the trade deficits have to be financed and the question is how long foreign investors will continue to finance America's recklessly misguided trade policies.

For every $1 of current account deficit, the United States has to sell $1 of American assets to foreigners. In the short run, the question is whether President Bush can struggle through next year without suffering a disastrous run on an already weak dollar. Such a run would raise the price of imports across the board, discomfiting American consumers and businesses alike. It would also drastically exacerbate America's problems in financing the Iraq reconstruction work and other huge foreign commitments. Perhaps most politically hurtful would be that it would almost certainly be accompanied by a shocking increase in American interest rates.

In the long run the United States faces a rapidly growing pattern of foreign ownership of key American assets. More and more U.S. Treasury bonds, for instance, are being bought by foreign financial institutions, leaving the U.S. government increasingly dependent on the whims of financial regulators in nations like Japan and China. Such erstwhile pillars of American industry as Amoco and Chrysler have been bought by foreigners. Japanese corporations have recently bought two of the crown jewels of American high technology, IBM's path-breaking disk-drive division and Lucent's optical fiber operations. Much of Wall Street is now owned by foreign capital and German corporations alone own more than 50 percent of the American book publishing industry.

In effect America is selling the family silver -- and, as profligate households have discovered down the ages, you can only sell the family silver once. Eventually there will be a reckoning as the money runs out. Within the space of a single generation America is presiding over the sell-off of much of its industrial and commercial base. Need it be added that this base required the sweat and enterprise of many earlier generations to create.

If this trend continues, the power of foreign bankers, investors, and financial regulators will soon become a dominant force in American public life. This has profound implications for everything from the level of U.S. interest rates to the way American corporations are run. Basically the issue in the long run is who owns the United States. In truth no great power since the last days of the Ottoman Empire has tried to project so much power abroad from such a weak economic base at home.

Up to a certain level, Americans will hardly notice the rise in foreign ownership -- but history in other nations shows that beyond a certain tipping point, foreign ownership becomes a bitterly hated and sometimes violently opposed intrusion on national sovereignty. It is for this reason that both Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the two founding fathers of Western economic thought, counselled that it is best for all concerned if economic assets are owned by local people. We are not at this tipping point yet but we are hurtling towards it at a frightening rate.

Eamonn Fingleton's latest book, Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma is Destroying American Prosperity, is being published this month by Nation Books. His 1999 book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity, foreshadowed the dot.com collapse.

posted 12-29-2003 11:53 AM            

"Free" trades benefits aren't for you and I.

In the New global economic world order...YOU the worker will be competing against everyone else in the whole world...for WHO will work for the lowest wage.

The "Race to the bottom" began YEARS ago.

On WE can stop it by getting mad about it in the voting booth.

posted 12-29-2003 01:52 PM            

Logic would seem to dictate, if you really don't want The Beast to grow, at least stop feeding it.

posted 12-29-2003 09:38 PM            

I have tried to buy nothing but products made right here in America for the last 30 years. Funny how some of the products you need are produced overseas (computers, televisions, phones, stereos, appliances, etc., etc.)

Americans will rise to the cause when they have been shoved far enough

posted 12-30-2003 09:18 AM            

but as you know it takes extra effort. I really buy very little anyway, as 'materialism' is about at the bottom of my preferred concerns.

Even American companies though who's policies regarding 'ethical conduct' I don't agree with, I won't support if I find out about it. If I have a choice between an "ethcial/fair" foreign company, or an "unethical/ unfair" and perhaps even criminal American company I tend to favor ethics over any loyalty to a 'party'.

I think it was Bush SR? that said something like may country right or wrong and how he would never apologize for mistakes or criminal activity on the part of his country. I don't know for sure how he meant that, but I feel I serve my country best by supporting the ideals of freedom, justice, peace, honesty, and commitment to a win-win- scenario whenever realistically possible. That's American. That's The Way.