Globalization Once Made the World Go Around. Is It About to Grind to a Halt? Larry Elliott - The Guardian
go to original January 21, 2017

Concerns grow in Mexico over Trump's trade policy (CGTN America)

His speech was like one normally expected of an American president. Countries must resist the temptation to retreat into harbor, the world leader said to a packed and admiring audience, but instead have the courage to swim in the vast ocean of the global market.

This was the kind of paean to free trade that might have come from John F Kennedy, George W Bush or Bill Clinton – all occupants of the White House who saw it as the United States’s role to defend the open international trading system set up at the end of the second world war.

This, though, was China’s president, Xi Jinping, in Davos last week, making it clear that he was prepared to fill the vacuum if Donald Trump went ahead with the sort of protectionist policies he had proposed in his election campaign.

The new US president has said he will renegotiate the Nafta free trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico and slap duties on imports from countries that don’t play by global trade rules. He also floated the idea of a 35% tariff on goods from Mexico, a 45% tariff on goods from China, and a border tax – which would impose a levy on imports but not exports.

Those attending Davos reassured themselves that Trump would ditch all these proposals once he was in office. But if he doesn’t, the consequences are obvious: the world will be plunged into a trade war that will bring the globalization of the past quarter of a century to a juddering halt.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Protectionism Posing Risk to Global Economy (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

Related: Will Trump's Tough Talk on Immigration Cause a Farm Labor Shortage? (KNPR)

Related: Mexico Braced for Exodus to US as ‘Trump Effect’ Hurts the Peso (The Guardian)

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