It’s Time to Amend or Discard U.S.-Korean Trade Agreement

Press reports emerging on Monday, July 3^rd, suggest that President Trump is pushing for a special 30-day review to amend the U.S.-South Korean trade deal known as KORUS. Last week, South Korean President Moon Jae-In said he wanted no change to KORUS, so it’s not yet clear what will happen. But there’s plenty of room to improve upon (or discard) a trade agreement that has delivered little to nothing for the U.S. Five years after it went into effect, KORUS has seen only continued Korean economic growth, but an escalating bilateral deficit for the U.S.

Administration Needs to Defend Our Steel Industry

This past April, on a 92-mile bike ride through the hills of Monterey, California, I met a young man I’m proud to call a friend, Rasheen Malone. Rasheen (pictured, in Team Semper Fi jersey) grew up in a tough section of Brooklyn, not far from where I was born. At 18, Rasheen joined the U.S. Marines. He did four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. On one of those tours, he stepped on an IED (land mine) and had both his legs blown off. Military surgeons fixed him up—he has two rods and 13 pins in each leg, and to watch him walk you might not know it. As we biked, slowly, up the steepest part of the climb in the Monterey hills, I asked Rasheen how it feels to pull a bike uphill with all that hardware in his legs.

Feds Should Stop Chinese Acquisition of Sole U.S. Rare Earth Mine

A U.S. bankruptcy court has decided to sell a California mine, the sole U.S. source of rare earth minerals, to a consortium including Chinese mining company Shenghe Rare Earth Shareholding Co. If the transaction goes ahead, this would turn over the unique domestic producer of these vital minerals, used in many high-tech electronics products, to a Chinese-affiliated company. 

In Praise of William J. Baumol, Economist Who Identified Market Imperfections

On May 4^th, Professor William J. Baumol died at the age of 95. He was a prodigious writer and innovator in economic theory, author of some 500 papers over the more than half a century he taught at Princeton University and NYU.  At least once, he was reportedly on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Economics, and if anyone deserved it, he did. I’ve read a couple of the obituaries of Prof. Baumol and I thought they missed the point of much of his work so I’d like to add my own.

British Trade Boost Shows Currency Devaluation Works

Car assembly at Nissan UK

Establishment free traders often claim trade policy reform is futile, urging us instead to simply trust the free market. Recent experience in Britain shows that one trade policy—currency devaluation—does work, and pretty quickly too. Despite imports growing more expensive, both consumption and exports increased.

China Targets World Leadership in Microchips

The decision last month by microchip manufacturer GlobalFoundries to build a chipmaking plant in China reinforced fears in the U.S. technology industry over China’s ambitious plans to become a major player in the world semiconductor industry. 

Why a Trade War Won’t Happen…But We Would Win If It Did

There has been lots of talk of the danger of “trade wars” in newspapers in recent months. The Trade War Alarmists are likely wrong.