UK and India sign a ‘landmark’ trade agreement after years of tough negotiations
#freetrade #trade #India #Britain #uk

https://apnews.com/article/uk-india-trade-deal-starmer-modi-6cbaf787f49a08aac18f93b2601d09f2

"Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”"

https://unherd.com/2025/05/the-centrist-comeback-wont-last/

#GlobalEconomy already feeling drag from #TrumpTariffs

#Trump's #tariffs are increasingly clogging up the wheels of a world #economy which for decades were greased by predictable & relatively #FreeTrade.

Big-name multinationals right down to niche e-commerce players last week cut sales targets, warned of #job cuts & reviewed their #business plans, while major economies revised down growth prospects amid bleak data read-outs.

#recession #trumpcession
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-economy-already-feeling-drag-trump-tariffs-2025-05-05/

…countries passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. …[now we have] a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/

#Cory_doctorow #unexpectedupside

Britain and the European Union are about to sign a formal commitment to “free and open trade” in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff plans. Read more from @politico
https://flip.it/1Z5Kgf
#Britain #EU #FreeTrade #Trump #Tariffs #Europe

"In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-protectionism-manufacturing-industrial-policy

Trump suggested that he'd only accept #tariff #negotiations with the EU if the EU commits to paying a large, #yearly sum of money.

We have a word for that: #tribute

#Trump expects / demands the #EU to pay tribute to the #US.

Just #fuckoff already!

I'm not one to agree with the #Chinese #government often, but they called it nicely: the US is a #bully.

@EUCommission if you guys #negotiate, you might as well start licking his boots and pay tribute.

The #Tories were NEVER the party of #FreeTrade. Quite the opposite. The Tories were always the party of the Corn Laws, which is to say #Tariffs and #Protectionism.

I wonder whether those folks who have dissed #freetrade and #globalization over recent years despite the prosperity and poverty reduction it has brought are paying attention now that the orange madman is giving them what they asked for.

Anyone else notice how quiet the neoliberals have been lately?

For decades, conservative fans of FA Hayek and Milton Friedman have told us that free trade and free markets are their core principles.

That we should let the invisible hand of the market decide.

That any government intervention, no matter how well intended, distorts the markets.

That government intervention in markets is socialism.

That governments shouldn't pick winners.

That taxes are bad.

That if there's a choice between government intervention to stop global warming from fossil fuel pollution or free trade, they'll gladly pick free trade.

Right back to Reagan and Thatcher, they swore these were their core principles.

So.

An American president intervening in markets by imposing arbitrary protectionist tariff taxes should have been a hard no.

A political candidate openly campaigning on doing this should have met stiff opposition from the invisible hand's true believers.

If a true believer in these neoliberal principles (as Rupert Murdoch has claimed to be) owned a news channel (such as Fox News), one would expect outrage at this blatant rejection of free markets and free trade.

So where are all the neoliberal think tanks? Economists? Politicians?

Why the silence?

One thing that I haven’t seen discussed much about Trump’s tariffs is how it increases the risk of large-scale war going forward.

The free trade economic model adopted post-WW2 was specifically designed to make countries economically interdependent and therefore less likely to go to war with each other. (It was also intended to make the rich even richer, in which it wildly succeeded, but that’s another story.)

Trump’s dismantling free trade will undermine global stability for decades to come. If there is a WW3, we may be able to point to today as a significant contributing factor.

Cartoon by Malcolm Mayes for Postmedia

Allen, die Zölle für eine eher abstrakte transatlantische Gefahr halten, sei hier mal der #Brexit vor Augen geführt: ich hatte einen etwas teureren Artikel in GB gekauft (weil nur dort erhältlich), der ist heute angekommen und der Paketbote hat uns f***ing 10% #Zoll plus eine unverschämt hohe Auslagepauschale abgeknöpft. Global gesehen mögen das Peanuts sein, es ist aber ein schönes Beispiel dafür, dass #Freihandel allen nützt und andersrum #Handelskrieg|e allen schaden.

So while the UK is scrabbling around wondering how we might continue trading with a protectionist Trumpian America (see earlier post on services & exports to the USA), the EU has been negotiating & now concluded a major free trade deal with Mercosur, gaining access to a major South American trading bloc for European exports (with tariff reductions across around 90% of exports)... if only we'd been part of that; oh well... can't complain, at least we're 'independent'!

#Brexit #FreeTrade
h/t FT

SPOT ON!!! You really to have to understand political economy, monetary economics, and economic history to tackle the current historical macro-scenario -

"The next question is whether the protectionist policies espoused by Mr. Trump can save the people who are asking for his help. Unfortunately, the trade wars of the 1930s suggest the answer is probably “No.”

In the 1930s, the global economy was thrown into turmoil by the sharp increases in US import duties implemented in 1930 under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the retaliatory tariffs by other nations that followed. The value of global trade plunged 66% from the peak, and economies around the world suffered heavily.

The resulting economic turmoil eventually led to World War II. The US, which got through the greatest tragedy in human history by mobilizing its military capabilities, decided the world must never repeat this mistake. To that end, it introduced the system of free trade symbolized by the 1947 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).

This US-led free trade system produced unprecedented prosperity for humanity, but cracks began to appear when the nature of the currency market changed after the developed nations began liberalizing capital flows in 1980.

Today, just as in the 1930s, free trade is facing a potential crisis in the form of a sharp increase in US tariffs. If the authorities seriously wish to avoid this outcome, I think the nations of the world must come together and carry out an exchange rate adjustment similar to the Plaza Accord."

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/trump-tariffs-and-exchange-rates-the-message-of-elections-in-the-us-and-japan

#USA #Trump #Protectionism #FreeTrade #USTariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #MonetaryPolicy #EconomicHistory
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/trump-tariffs-and-exchange-rates-the-message-of-elections-in-the-us-and-japan

As we in the U.S. enjoy the last moments of #freetrade for some period of time, I'd like to point out that we had this same #tariff mania over a century ago and discovered that it was a disaster. The definitive book on the subject was written by a writer named #henrygeorge . The book was called "Protection or Free Trade". I did not imagine that this 1886 book would be necessary reading in my lifetime #economics #protectionism #history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_or_Free_Trade