trade

There has been a lot of chatter of late about countries ditching the US dollar as the primary reserve currency and moving on to something else. Robert Zoellick mentioned gold as the alternative. Nicolas Sarkozy has been talking up special…

by Marc Chandler Russia is the last of the major countries that has not joined the World Trade Organization. The importance of the WTO may not be so much in liberalizing trade as negotiations take years. The WTO predecessor was GATT, which…

by Marc Chandler At the end of last week, the US and Korea appeared to reach the basis of agreement that will also resuscitate the moribund free-trade effort. In essence it appears that slowing down the liberalization in the auto sector…

The under-current from Putin's remarks has much to do with anti-US Dollar sentiment because he said specifically that having the U.S. dollar as the sole reserve currency "is definitely something negative." Putin is serious about ditching…

I caught this at the bottom of Andy Lees' morning note: China – To limit inflation China will impose price controls on food according to the NDRC, and will severely punish anyone found speculating on corn or cotton. “The policies that…

This is a post I wrote at New Deal 2.0 on the potential for a disastrous trade war. There has been a considerable amount of discussion about current account imbalances in light of last weekend’s failed G20 summit. For the most part, the…

Another economic parody

China reported an October trade surplus of $27 billion Wednesday. This is a very big number and not one likely to soothe anger directed at China. It will be very hard for China credibly to argue that it is trying to contribute to global…

Bloomberg notes: South Korea may revive a 14 percent tax on domestic Treasury and central bank bonds held by foreigners as early as January to curb foreign-exchange volatility, a ruling party lawmaker said. “If we don’t do it right now…

Here's a re-post of mine from New Deal 2.0 on the Germans and their political rhetoric on QE. Okay, I did a few years of German language study, so I know that the real word for hypocrite is “Heuchler”. But when I read the latest guff from…