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The TPP (and similar things) thread


Larry

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n a separate report Wednesday, Colin Langan, an analyst at UBS Securities LLC, said the proposed border tax could raise average prices in the U.S. by about 8 percent, or $2,500 per vehicle. That’s enough to reduce annual sales by about 2 million vehicles, he said.

 

Langan said he expects a draft bill to be released in late February or early March. He pegged the chances of a border tax being enacted at less than 50 percent. The tax has a good chance of making its way through the House of Representatives but is “very unlikely” to pass in the Senate, Langan said.

 

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4 hours ago, Larry said:

 

This is news?  

 

Donald Trump ignores facts he doesn't like.  

 

 

Well, they aren't facts.  I think a reasonably good argument can be made for ignoring the rulings of the WTO (and essentially causing a collapse of the WTO).  (It limits our ability to tie economics with foreign policy and affect things like China building islands in the S. China sea).  Though, I'd rather see it done in a legal manner than simply ignoring them (I'm not quite sure what would be required for us to withdraw from (some rulings of) the WTO legally.  Would it require a law from Congress?

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It was America that insisted on the creation of the WTO as the finishing touch to the Uruguay round of the GATT negotiations, to prevent other countries from cheating on trade deals (in particular, I think we wanted to enforce Europe to scale back its agricultural subsidies). Scrapping the WTO will bite us in the ass a lot harder than it's worth for whatever scraps it allows us to steal from the table.

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http://fortune.com/2017/06/30/trump-bmw-daimler-geely-airbus-america-manufacturing/?xid=gn_editorspicks&google_editors_picks=true

 

 

‘Bad’ Foreign Firms Are Driving the U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Revival

 

Reuters analysis of federal jobs data shows that out of 656,000 new manufacturing jobs created between 2010 and 2014, two thirds can be attributed to foreign direct investment.

More recent jobs numbers are not yet available, but over $700 billion in foreign capital has poured in over the last two years bringing total foreign investment to $3.7 trillion at the end of 2016, a world record.

 

.....

And even as the company (BMW) highlights its contribution to the U.S. economy and the benefits of free trade, it is hedging its bets by preparing for a possible protectionist backlash.

Outside of the spotlight, BMW is retooling factories in South Africa and China to build volume models like the X3 SUV, reducing its dependence on Spartanburg.

“We have a big footprint here, and we are flexible enough," Oliver Zipse, BMW's board member responsible for manufacturing, told Reuters. "We will build the X3 not only in Spartanburg, we will split it into South Africa and then to China, so we will have some flexibility to produce cars somewhere else,” he said. “If something happens at the political level—which we don’t know yet—we are able to have a flexible response.”

 

......

And the most telling portion of this article:

"Negotiate a trade agreement with Europe, modernize NAFTA, don't tear it up," Graham told Reuters at the BMW factory. "We're going in the wrong direction. We need more trade agreements, not less."

Graham noted how low-cost competition from China and Mexico destroyed South Carolina's once thriving textile industry and how the state reinvented itself as a manufacturing hub, bringing the likes of BMW or French tire maker Michelin.

 

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I went to grad school in SC in the 90s, and their Senator Fritz Hollings was the most protectionist member of congress, who did everything possible to prop up a loser textile industry that paid dirt wages. Now the state has an abundance of higher paying manufacturing jobs from foreign investment, and their senior Senator Lindsey Graham is one of the biggest backers of free trade.

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This is how you nurture an industry, if you're serious about it.

 

 

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Chinese companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s enough to supply batteries for around 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles or 13.7 million Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids per year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

 

By comparison, when completed in 2018, Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory will crank out up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually.

 

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Roughly 55 percent of global lithium-ion battery production is already based in China, compared with 10 percent in the U.S. By 2021, China’s share is forecast to grow to 65 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“This is about industrial policy. The Chinese government sees lithium-ion batteries as a hugely important industry in the 2020s and beyond,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Colin McKerracher said.

In all, global battery-making capacity is forecast to more than double by 2021 to 273 gigawatt-hours, up from about 103 gigawatt-hours today. That’s a huge opportunity, and China doesn’t want to miss it.

 

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