The Coming Trade War and Global Depression

By
Henry C.K. Liu

Many historians have suggested that the 1929 stock market crash was not the cause of the Great Depression. If anything, the 1929 crash was the technical reflection of the inevitable fate of an overblown bubble economy. Yet, stock market crashes can recover within a relatively short time with the help of effective government monetary measures, as demonstrated by the crashes of 1987 (23% drop, recovered in 9 months), 1998 (36% drop, recovered in 3 months) and 2000-2 (37% drop, recovered in 2 months). Structurally, the real cause of the Great Depression, which lasted more than a decade, from 1929 till the beginning of the Second World War in 1941, was the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that put world trade into a tailspin from which it did not recover until World War II began. While the US economy finally recovered from war mobilization after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1940, most of the world’s market economies sunk deeper into war-torn distress and never fully recovered until the Korea War boom in 1951.

Phyllis Schlafly, syndicated conservative columnist, responded three weeks later in an article: Free Trade is an Economic Issue, Not a Moral One.  In it, she notes while conservatives should be happy to finally have a president who adds a moral dimension to his actions, “the Bible does not instruct us on free trade and it’s not one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus did not tell us to follow Him along the road to free trade. … Nor is there anything in the U.S. Constitution that requires us to support free trade and to abhor protectionism. In fact, protectionism was the economic system believed in and practiced by the framers of our Constitution. Protective tariffs were the principal source of revenue for our federal government from its beginning in 1789 until the passage of the 16th Amendment, which created the federal income tax, in 1913. Were all those public officials during those hundred-plus years remiss in not adhering to a “moral obligation” of free trade?”  Hardly, argues Schlafly whose views are noteworthy because US politics is currently enmeshed in a struggle between strict-constructionist paleo-conservatives and moral-imperialist neo-conservatives.  Despite the ascendance of neo-imperialism in US foreign policy, protectionism remains strong in US political culture, particularly among conservatives and in the labor movement.

Bush also said China, which reached a trade agreement with the US at the close of the Clinton administration, and became a member of the WTO in late 2001, would benefit from political changes as a result of liberalized trade policies.  This pronouncement gives clear evidence to those in China who see foreign trade as part of an anti-China “peaceful evolution” strategy first envisioned by John Forster Dulles, US Secretary of State under Eisenhower in the 1950s. It is a strategy of inducing through peaceful trade the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reform itself out of power and to eliminate the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of bourgeois liberalization.  Almost four decades later, Deng Xiaoping criticized CPC Chairman Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Ziyang for having failed to contain bourgeois liberalization in their implementation of China’s modernization policy. Deng warned in November 1989, five months after the Tiananmen incident: “The Western imperialist countries are staging a third world war without guns. They want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism.”  Deng’s handling of the Tiananmen incident prevented China from going the catastrophic route of the USSR which dissolved in 1991.

Yet it is clear that political freedom is often the first casualty of a garrison state mentality and such mentality inevitably results from hostile US economic and security policy toward any country the US deems as not free.  Whenever the US pronounces a nation to be not free, that nation will become less free as a result of US policy. This has been repeatedly evident in China and elsewhere in the Third World.  Whenever US policy toward China turns hostile, as it currently appears to be heading, political and press freedom inevitably face stricter curbs. For trade to mutually and truly benefit the trading economies, three conditions are necessary: 1) the de-linking of trade from ideological/political objectives, 2) equality must be maintained in the terms of trade and 3) recognition that global full employment at rising, living wages is the prerequisite for true comparative advantage in global trade.

The developing rupture between the sole superpower and its traditionally deferential allies lies in mounting trade conflicts. The US has benefited from an international financial architecture that gives the US economy a structural monetary advantage over those of the EU and Japan, not to mention the rest of the world.  Trade issues range from government subsidies disputes between Airbus and Boeing, banana, sugar, beef, oranges, steel, as well as disputes over fair competition associated with mergers and acquisition and financial services. If either government is found to be in breach of WTO rules when these disputes wind through long processes of judgment, the other will be authorized to retaliate. The US could put tariffs on other European goods if the WTO rules against Airbus and vice versa. So if both governments are found in breach, both could retaliate, leading to a cycle of offensive protectionism. When the US was ruled to have unfairly supported its steel industry, tariffs were slapped by the EU on Florida oranges to make a political point in a politically important state in US politics.

Trade competition between the EU and the US is spilling over into security areas, allowing economic interests to conflict with ideological sympathy.  Both of these production engines, saddled with serious overcapacity, are desperately seeking new markets, which inevitably leads them to Asia in general and China in particular, with its phenomenal growth rate and its 1.2 billion eager consumers bulging with rapidly rising disposable income.  The growth of the Chinese economy will lift all other economies in Asia, including Australia which has only recently begun to understand that its future cannot be separated from its geographic location and that its prosperity is interdependent with those of other Asian economies. Australian iron ores, beef and dairy products are destined for China, not the British Isles. The EU is eager to lift its 15-year-old arms embargo on China, much to the displeasure of the US. Israel faces similar dilemma in its close relations with the US on military sales to China. Even the US defense establishment has largely come around to the view that US arms industry must export, even to China, to remain on top. The Bangkok Post reported on June 7 that Rumsfeld tried to sell to Thailand F-16 warplanes capable of firing advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAMs) two days after he lashed out in Singapore at China for upgrading its own military when no neighboring nations are threatening it. The sales pitch was in competition with Russian-made Sukhoi SU-30s and Swedish JAS-39s. The open competition in arms export had been spelled out for Congress years earlier by Donald Hicks, a leading Pentagon technologist in the Reagan administration. “Globalization is not a policy option, but a fact to which policymakers must adapt,” he said. “The emerging reality is that all nations’ militaries are sharing essentially the same global commercial-defense industrial base.”  The boots and uniforms worn by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq were made in China.

The WTO is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between its 148 member nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, known as the multilateral trading system, negotiated and signed by the majority of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The stated goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, with the dubious assumption that trade automatically brings equal benefits to all participants.  The welfare of the people is viewed only as a collateral aim based on the doctrinal fantasy that “balanced” trade inevitably brings prosperity equally to all, a claim that has been contradicted by facts produced by the very terms of trade promoted by the WTO itself.

Two decades of neo-liberal globalized trade have widened income and wealth disparity within and between nations. Free trade has turned out not to be the win-win game promised by neo-liberals.  It is very much a win-lose game, with heads, the rich economies win, and tails, the poor economies lose. Domestic development has been marginalized as a hapless victim of foreign trade, dependent on trade surplus for capital.  Foreign trade and foreign investment have become the prerequisite engines for domestic development. This trade model condemns those economies with trade deficits to perpetual underdevelopment.  Because of dollar hegemony, all foreign investment goes only to the export sector where dollars can be earned.  Even the economies with trade surpluses cannot use their dollar trade earnings for domestic development, as they are forced to hold huge dollar reserves to support the exchange rate of their currencies.

In the fifth WTO Ministerial Conference held in Cancun in September 2003, the richer countries rejected the demands of poorer nations for radical reform of agricultural subsidies that have decimated Third World agriculture. Failure to get the Doha round back on track after the collapse of Cancun runs the danger of a global resurgence of protectionism, with the US leading the way.  Larry Elliott reported on October 13, 2003 in The Guardian on the failed 2003 Cancun Ministerial meeting: “The language of globalization is all about democracy, free trade and sharing the benefits of technological advance. The reality is about rule by elites, mercantilism and selfishness.” Elliot noted that the process is full of paradoxes: why is it that in a world where human capital is supposed to be the new wealth of nations, labor is treated with such contempt?

Sam Mpasu, Malawi’s commerce and industry minister, asked at Cancun for his comments about the benefits of trade liberalization, replied dryly: “We have opened our economy. That’s why we are flat on our back.” Mpasu’s comments summarize the wide chasm that divides the perspectives of those who write the rules of globalization and those who are powerless to resist them.

Exports of manufactures by low-wage developing countries have increased rapidly over the last 3 decades due in part to falling tariffs and declining transport costs that enable outsourcing based on wage arbitrage. It grew from 25% in 1965 to nearly 75% over three decades, while agriculture’s share of developing country exports has fallen from 50% to under 10%.  Many developing countries have gained relatively little from increased manufactures trade, with most of the profit going to foreign capital. Market access for their most competitive manufactured export, such as textile and apparel, remains highly restricted and recent trade disputes threaten further restrictions. Still, the key cause of unemployment in all developing economies is the trade-related collapse of agriculture, exacerbated by the massive government subsidies provided to farmers in rich economies.  Many poor economies are predominantly agriculturally based and a collapse of agriculture means a general collapse of the whole economy.

The Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations, sponsored by the WTO, collapsed in Cancun, Mexico over the question of government support for agriculture in rich economies and its potential impacts on causing more poverty in developing countries. The Doha negotiations since Cancun are focused on the need to better understand the linkages between trade policies, particularly those of the rich economies, and poverty in the developing world.  While poverty reduction is now more widely accepted by establishment economists as a necessary central focus for development efforts and has become the main mission of the World Bank and other development institutions, very little effective measures have been forthcoming. The UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) commits the international community to halve world poverty by 2015, a decade from now. With current trends, that goal is likely to be achievable only through death of half of the poor by starvation, disease and local conflicts.  The UN Development Program warns that 3 million children will die in sub-Saharan Africa alone by 2015 if the world continues on its current path of failing to meet the UNMDG agreed to in 2000. Several key venues to this goal are located in international trade where the record of poverty reduction has been exceedingly poor, if not outright negative.  The fundamental question whether trade can replace or even augment socio-economic development remains unasked, let alone answered.  Until such issues are earnestly addressed, protectionism will re-emerge in the poor countries.  Under such conditions, if democracy expresses the will of the people, democracy will demand protectionism more than government by elite.

While tariffs in the past decade have been coming down like leaves in autumn, flexible exchange rates have become a form of virtual countervailing tariff.  In the current globalized neo-liberal trade regime operating in a deregulated global foreign exchange market, the exchanged value of a currency is regularly used to balance trade through government intervention in currency market fluctuations against the world’s main reserve currency – the dollar, as the head of the international monetary snake.

Purchasing power parity (PPP) measures the disconnection between exchange rates and local prices. PPP contrasts with the interest rate parity (IRP) theory which assumes that the actions of investors, whose transactions are recorded on the capital account, induces changes in the exchange rate. For a dollar investor to earn the same interest rate in a foreign economy with a PPP of four times, such as the purchasing power parity between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan, local wages would have to be at least 4 time lower than US wages.