Manufacturing Matters  |  May 30, 2010

The Manufacturing Sector as Sacrificial Lamb

The outcome of today’s Security and Economic Dialogue (S & ED) talks in Beijing is discouraging for those of us who want to see an immediate effect on Main Street. No specific movement has taken place on currency issues. China’s President Hu says he will take action on currency, but he doesn’t say what action he will take or when he will take it. China’s currency is undervalued by about 40%. It is unlikely that anything he is even contemplating would close that gap. And while we wait for him to make up his mind, more jobs in the U. S. will be lost to China.

The United States is playing defense everywhere in the world. Militarily we are losing influence and appear to be losing wars. Diplomatically our powers of persuasion are waning. And in international trade, jobs are moving off-shore, we have no sustained manufacturing policy, and the production sectors in other countries’ economies are growing faster than ours.

There is certainly a great effort to solve the military and diplomatic problems, but what are we doing on trade? President Obama is aware of the issue, but the solutions are hard to find and are not being articulated. To me, a large part of the problem is that industrial growth in this country, indeed what used to be called industrial policy, takes a second chair to almost every other policy in Washington. The biggest example of that right now is this failure to address currency undervaluation in China, in a forthright and immediate fashion. It has now been years since the problem has been identified ... more