Re: Greenspan squawks on trade

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



> "The buildup or reduction in financial claims among trading
countries--that
> is, capital flows--are hence exact mirrors of the current account
balances.
> And just as net trade and current accounts for the world as a whole
> necessarily sum to zero, so do net capital flows. Because for any
country
> the change in net claims against all foreigners cumulates to its current
> account balance (abstracting from valuation adjustments), that balance
must
> also equal the country's domestic saving less its domestic investment."
>
> In which case there is nothing economists can actually do to optimise
the
> allocation of scarce resources, except ensure that all impediments,
> restrictions and regulation on the operation of free market forces are
> removed.

========================


This is exactly what the language of 'non-tariff trade barriers' is
supposed to operationalize in order to undermine the distinction between
regulations and takings. It only remains for the corps. to use the new
forums for adjudication in the DSB, Nafta chapter 11 etc. etc. undo the
infinite onion of barriers until they come up against the baseline barrier
of capital itself as a mode of production.

From: FROM POLITICS TO TECHNOCRACY-AND BACK AGAIN: THE FATE OF THE
MULTILATERAL TRADING REGIME By Robert Howse
http://www.asil.org/ajil/wto6.pdf

"...there will always be a rather huge number of possible nontrade or not
explicitly trade-based policies that individual member states can
implement, which will undermine the value of the negotiated legal
disciplines to their trading partners.

These policies can take on the aspect of legitimate regulation for
noncommercial public purposes. At the same time, they may have the effect
of restricting market access, similarly to the explicit trade barriers
that member states have legally bound themselves to constrain or remove.
Let us say I bind myself not to increase tariffs on steel beyond 15
percent ad valorem.

What happens now, if by legislation I turn the steel industry into a
domestic monopoly? Or if I set a regulatory standard that foreign
competitors in the industry are unlikely to be able to meet, or that it
will cost them much more than the domestic industry to meet? Or if I
subsidize domestic production of steel? Which of these is a legitimate and
acceptable domestic policy, and which is "cheating" or reneging on my
trade liberalization commitments in a way that is apt to undermine
confidence in the system, if undertaken widely enough?

There is no natural or self-evident baseline or rule that can solve this
basic dilemma. Individual member states' perceptions of what policies fall
on one side of the line and what on the other are going to vary depending
on ideology, regulatory traditions, and so forth, all of which generate
intuitions about whether someone's regulatory behavior looks like "normal"
public policy or, rather, like something that might only be done in the
circumstances for protectionist reasons."
[snip]