Deficits, Dollar, Dubiously Free Trade, Treasury

Why Our Manufacturing Sector Is Disappearing (Hint: It’s Not Free Trade)


Are those containers carrying our former jobs?

While our dwindling manufacturing sector is not in the news like it used to be, given the current financial crisis, it’s gradual, (albeit often overstated), disappearance seems to be no mystery to anyone. Just pose the following question: “Why has the U.S. lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years?” I’d bet good money that the answer would be free trade, or maybe, NAFTA. It’s just common knowledge. Duh. As paleoconservative Pat Buchanan puts it, “Between January 2002 and January 2007, the gargantuan U.S. trade deficit set five straight world records…If this is the fruit of a successful trade policy, what would a failed trade policy look like?” (1) Or Barack Obama, who agrees with Pat on approximately nothing, is actually in perfect harmony with him here. “It’s a game where trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart.” I’ve even heard Lou Dobbs isn’t a fan. I guess John McCain gave free trade some modest support while he was running for president, but rarely gave much of a rationale for it. That seems pretty standard these days. I mean, look at the embarrassing attempts the guy defending free trade makes in this debate. Countries like China have much lower wages, fewer labor protections and significantly less environmental regulations. Of course every company that could, would up and leave the United States if there were no trade barriers. It’s that simple.

Well, that’s a very solid argument. It has but one small caveat to it… it’s completely, utterly and unredeemably wrong. I’ll skip the heavy lifting and let renowned economist Henry Hazlitt do it for me. Suppose:

“An American exporter sells his goods to a British importer and is paid in British pounds sterling. But he cannot use British pounds to pay the wages of his workers, to buy his wife’s clothes or to buy theater tickets. For all these purposes he needs American dollars. Therefore his British pounds are of no use to him unless he either uses them himself to buy British goods or sells them to some American importer…” (2)








To avoid these crises (and store a “risk free” currency in case of other problems), governments started stockpiling dollars to act as a bulwark in case their own currency was attacked. While the dollar was the reserve currency under Bretton Woods, as well as in the ’70’s and ’80’s, government stockpiles really accelerated in the 1990’s and 2000’s when China started taking off and the fall of communism brought with it a whole host of new countries, who, lacking Soviet support, needed to start stockpiling dollars.




Now we can have guns and butter, part deux, but without the inflation. How wonderful! Unfortunately, as Herb Stein once said, “things that can’t go on forever don’t.” The dollar currently makes up 63.8% of foreign reserves with the euro in distant second at 26.4%. This however, creates a very precarious situation. While the dollar is no longer sinking like a rock, many nations are very nervous about the massive number of bailouts and stimulus packages our government has been enacting. Foreign central banks are becoming so nervous they have started diversifying into the euro and other currencies. If we’re not careful, they will pull the plug and all those dollars will come rushing back to the United States. If this happens, the dollar will hyperinflate overnight.

Our manufacturing sector is being hollowed out and we may even be facing a monetary crisis to compliment our financial crisis. However, free trade has nothing to do with it. Anyways, we really don’t even have free trade; NAFTA and the WTO are managed trade agreements that have plenty of tariffs and subsidies stuck into them. As Milton Friedman said when Charlie Rose asked him about the proposed Central American version of NAFTA, “I discovered it was a thousand pages long and every page has exceptions to free trade. It’s not a free trade agreement.” (3) Still, what we have isn’t rampant protectionism either. But if we just throw up a bunch of tariffs right now, other countries would almost assuredly retaliate (or possibly sell off their dollars) and prices would rise without our manufacturing sector returning. It would be Smoot-Hawley all over again. It’s that simple.


Note: There are other reasons for the reduction in our manufacturing sector that would be too arduous to describe in detail here. Comparative advantage and the United States’ transition to a more service and technology oriented economy, have certainly played a part. They have not, however, played a part in our large trade deficits.


**The CIA doesn’t have data on seven small countries and a few have old data. However, every country with old data has a deficit/surplus fewer than 100 million dollars. Similar estimations can be made for the seven exclusions, which include the likes of North Korea. These discrepancies certainly wouldn’t add up to anything close to 378 billion dollars.





4 thoughts on “Why Our Manufacturing Sector Is Disappearing (Hint: It’s Not Free Trade)

  1. Loved this article and it inspired the new category ‘Dubiously Free Trade.’ Almost all trade conducted between nations isn’t truly free.

    Because every export is an equal import for another country, global trade accounts should balance to zero.

    Send this piece to anyone who wants to wrap their heads around trade and currency.


  2. jerb says:

    I imagine China would be pretty pissed if other countries started selling off their dollars. And if China started selling off their treasury notes they would decrease their own wealth and again other countries wealth. I’m not too worried about this ever happening… welcome to a global economy… we’re all in this together now… I see this as a good thing however.

    Why is our debt such a big deal, when a very resilient country like Japan has relatively twice as much debt as our own?


    • I would have completely agreed with you a year ago. While I’m not sure, as things stand today, if China will start selling off T-bills, I would expect them to stop purchasing U.S. government paper in the future. They’re also looking to start one of the world’s biggest investment funds to reinvest their s(t)inking U.S. debt.

      China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, said this during the March G20 meetings in London:

      “We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course, we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I’m a little bit worried. I would like to call on the United States to honour its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

      A month earlier, a director-general of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, Luo Ping, had this to say about having to continue buying U.S. Treasuries:

      “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion … we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys – but there is nothing much we can do….”

      There’s nothing they can do about the trillion dollars of U.S. government paper they already hold, sure. But it sounds to me like they don’t plan on purchasing new debt forever.

      So, perhaps, if the United States never ran a budget deficit ever again, the current debt wouldn’t be life threatening. Unfortunately, the expected health care costs alone in the U.S., as mentioned in my eBook, ‘Economy Twist,’ is more than enough future expenditure’s to ensure we will not be a “credible debtor nation.”

      Not even the charm of Hilary Clinton, ending her world tour in China to ask the Chinese to keep buying our Treasuries, will be a winning strategy forever.

      Because most recent GDP numbers are as of January 1, 2008, I’m going to do some basic estimating. GDP growth in ’08 was basically flat in the U.S. The CIA reported our debt as a % of GDP at 60.8% on 1/1/08. GDP in 2008 was $14.26 trillion. That would put U.S. public debt at around $8.67 trillion. Our debt is more like $11.2 trillion where we stand now. So, as a % of GDP, we’re at about 78.5% of GDP.

      The CIA reports Japanese public debt at 170% of their GDP as of 1/1/08. Their GDP was $4.92 trillion in ’08 which puts their debt at roughly $8.37 trillion. I’m not sure what kind of spending the Japanese have been up to this year but it can’t hold a candle to ours. The Japanese also learned a valuable lesson trying to prop up bad assets (speculative bubbles in stocks and real estate) through the 1980’s by quantitative easing (printing money, actually creating new money electronically). They’ve suffered severe stagflation over the years despite real rates of interest at 0%. So while Japan has been resilient, I’m not sure it’s a model to duplicate. The U.S. has more total debt than the Japanese and greater future obligations. Plus, our current economic policy is quite similar to that of vintage Japan. We hit real interest rates of zero last fall and have been furiously increasing the money supply to pay for propping up toxic debt.

      I’ll have more on why debt is a bad thing later. As of now, that’s it for me. Happy Cinco de Mayo!


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