two stories reacting to yesterday's release of trade figures, which show a record trade deficit. in the ny times this morning:
Quote:
Trade Deficit Reaches All-Time High in February
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 12, 2005
Filed at 10:44 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. trade deficit, exacerbated by surging imports of oil and textiles, soared to an all-time high of $61.04 billion in February.
The Commerce Department said Tuesday that the February imbalance was up 4.3 percent from a $58.5 billion trade gap in January as a small $50 million rise in U.S. exports of goods and services was swamped by a $2.58 billion increase in imports.
The surging trade deficit is leading to an increase in protectionist pressures as American textile and clothing manufacturers are lobbying the administration to limit imports of Chinese textile and clothing goods to ward off a flood of products now that global quotas have expired.
For February, imports of textiles and clothing from China rose by 9.8 percent even though America's overall trade gap with China actually narrowed to $13.9 billion, down by 9.2 percent from a January deficit of $15.3 billion. The improvement reflected an increase in U.S. exports to China and declines in other import categories outside of textiles.
For the first two months of this year, the trade deficit is running at an annual rate of $717.2 billion, a full $100 billion above the record imbalance of $617.1 billion set for all of 2004.
Trade deficits of this magnitude have raised worries among economists about America's ability to continue to attract the foreign financing needed to cover the shortfall between exports and imports. If foreigners decided to hold fewer dollar-denominated investments such as stocks and bonds, it could trigger steep declines in U.S. stock prices and a sharp increase in interest rates.
Critics point to the soaring deficits as evidence that President Bush's free trade policies are not working and have instead contributed to the loss of 3 million American manufacturing jobs since 2000.
The Bush administration argues that the deficit primarily reflects the fact that the U.S. economy has been growing at a much faster pace than the economies of its major trading partners, pushing up imports while dampening demand for U.S. exports. Treasury Secretary John Snow was expected to use a Saturday meeting of finance officials from the Group of Seven major industrial countries to once again lobby for Europe and Japan to pursue more growth-oriented policies.
The U.S. dollar has been declining for three years, a fact that should help narrow the trade deficit by making imports more expensive to American consumers while making U.S. exports cheaper. However, economists say the dollar needs to fall further to deal with the widening trade deficit, and they are predicting a further increase in the trade gap this year.
The record February deficit of $61.04 billion surpassed the old record of $59.4 billion set last November.
Imports of goods and services rose by 1.6 percent to an all-time high of $161.5 billion.
Demand for foreign petroleum products shot up 10.3 percent to $18.2 billion, the second highest level on record, surpassed only by $19.6 billion in imports of petroleum last November.
The February increase reflected higher prices as crude oil climbed to $36.85 per barrel, compared to $35.25 in January, offsetting a drop in the volume of oil imports. Analysts said America's foreign oil bill is likely to climb even further in months ahead, reflecting further increases in global oil prices.
Exports were up by $50 million to a record $100.48 billion in February, reflecting increases in shipments of drilling and oilfield equipment, civilian aircraft and pharmaceutical products. These gains offset declines in sales of U.S.-made cars and auto parts and food.
The administration, at the urging of U.S. textile and clothing manufacturers, has begun investigations into whether to re-impose quotas on Chinese imports of various products to protect the domestic industry from market disruptions following the removal of global quotas that had restricted shipments to the United States for more than three decades.
|
obviously most of the coverage is centered on textiles, which seems to function as a way of staging a conflict between industries interested in maintaining a nationally-organized manufacturing base (this despite the nature of textiles as an industry, fully integrated into the globalizing capitalist system)...only passing reference to other advsersely affected sectors: automobiles, steel, technology....
here is another take from le monde this morning:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,...-638260,0.html
the text is in french (sorry about that) but the general argument is straightforward enough: grouping the various declining sectors together, the writer at le monde argues that these figures indicate an acceleration of the deindustrialization process with older, heavier industries caught in a nasty circle of rising costs, declining investment and stagnant production levels.
the le monde article quotes a former reagan staff economist as worrying about the implications of this trend in american economic devolution: that the states is in danger of becoming a country that exports raw materials and imports finished products.
all this is predictated on the illusion that nation-states can be understood as geographic expressions of patterns of ownership--something that in structural terms has been ludicrous since the early 1970s, at the point where international stock trade was instituted, and which is even more obviously absurd now.
why the difference in coverage?
1. i would link it to a kind of systemic neoliberal biais in american journalism concerning economic matters: the two major parties are simply arguing for variants of the same basic order, one rooted in fictions concerning markets, their self-regulating character and disregard of both data that tends to falsify these ideological assumptions and the social consequences of neoliberalism in general.
2. it also seems to follow from the nationalist frame of reference brought to bear by the ny times, which i take (for better or worse) to still be one of the more consistently interesting dailies in the states. for the nyt writer, this increasingly obsolete category of nation-state remains a primary organizing tool for processing data. the assumptions behind it appear to be those of bushworld: that it at some level makes sense to simultaneously encourage an acceleration in the transnationalization of production (which follows on the transnationalisation of ownership) and remain nationalist in some way. the bush=specific solution to the contradictions any child could see in this? ignore social consequences altogether and work to substitute a kind of hallucinatory nationalism rooted in the usual suspects the "war on terror" blind patriotism, the framing of arguments in nonfalsifiable ways about the status of nation, the endless repetition of reassuring banalities about capitalism lifting all boats, and the systematic suppression of information that might indicate the contrary is in fact holding.
so it looks like the difference in coverage between these two papers can be explained with reference to a consensus that cuts across those minimal lines that in fact seperate the two major political parties concerning economic ideology. it seems to me that this consensus is central to the drift-toward-identity of the two parties (republican media delusions to the contrary notwithstanding) and to the massive act of collective self-blinding to the consequences of policies that derive from this economic ideology.
what do you make of this?