The Far More Meaningful Counterpoint to Payroll Friday

by Jeffrey P. Snider
Alhambra Partners

In early 2005, the US Senate began debating a bill seeking to impose a broad 27.5% tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. Congress was emotionally moved by the supposed problem of pegging the yuan to the dollar, then at about 8.28 CNY for every USD. In reality, the problem wasn’t so much dollars as “dollars”, meaning that because of the flow of finance across borders the flow of goods could be, though for only a short while longer, a one-way trade. In other words, even the government started to notice that so much of the stuff Americans were buying during the housing bubble was stamped “Made in China.”

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