{"id":1032,"date":"2009-09-18T09:14:27","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T13:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2018-03-05T11:36:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T16:36:20","slug":"us-tariff-on-chinese-tires-a-colossal-blunder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/09\/18\/us-tariff-on-chinese-tires-a-colossal-blunder\/","title":{"rendered":"US tariff on Chinese tires “a colossal blunder”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t read The Economist<\/em> regularly these days, having given up my 20-year subscription about five years back. Their steady drift away from free markets towards statist models made the publication less and less interesting (and much more live most other financial publications). This article<\/a>, however, at least covers the situation in an even-handed way:<\/p>\n

\n

You can be fairly sure that when a government slips an announcement out at nine o\u2019clock on a Friday night, it is not proud of what it is doing. That is one of the only things that makes sense about Barack Obama\u2019s decision to break a commitment he, along with other G20 leaders, reaffirmed last April: to avoid protectionist measures at a time of great economic peril. In every other way the president\u2019s decision to slap a 35% tariff on imported Chinese tyres looks like a colossal blunder, confirming his critics\u2019 worst fears about the president\u2019s inability to stand up to his party\u2019s special interests and stick to the centre ground he promised to occupy in office.<\/p>\n

This newspaper endorsed Mr Obama at last year\u2019s election in part because he had surrounded himself with enough intelligent centrists. We also said that the eventual success of his presidency would be based on two things: resuscitating the world economy; and bringing the new emerging powers into the Western order. He has now hurt both objectives.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Several sources mentioned that yesterday’s announcement about cancelling the ABM systems that were to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic was an attempt to cozy up to Russia. This move can only be interpreted as an attempt to look tough against the Chinese — which would just be dumb — or (even more disturbingly) solid proof that Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue<\/em> on international trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t read The Economist regularly these days, having given up my 20-year subscription about five years back. Their steady drift away from free markets towards statist models made the publication less and less interesting (and much more live most other financial publications). This article, however, at least covers the situation in an even-handed way: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25,13],"tags":[158,266,1185],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-economics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-protectionism","tag-tariffs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}