The WTO has been loosing its credibility
I saw an article to the effect that WTO was , unfortunately, loosing its credibility. They pointed to a recent WTO ruling that Europe should accept bananas from US companies (grown is the Americas). The Europeans thumbed their nose and refused to go along.
I think that what we have here is a Europe, and probably Japan too, full of people extremely jealous and resentful of the unpresidented economic growth without inflation we have enjoyed since 1992 in the US. Every one here with a 401k has gotten wealthy in the stock market, US tech is light years ahead with intelectual property laws being used to compound a competitive advantage here. The net is dominated by English language content. We demonstrate un-dreamed of precisely accurate high tech military might on CNN. Manufacturing has successfully adopted continuous process improvement and is takeing the European ISO 9000 a giant step forward with QS 9000. We are into fast cycle times for product development that are closing in on the Japanese.
No US citizen should be ashamed of our leading position. It has its roots in free enterprise. Between 1985 and 1992, this country let economics effect efficiencies unhampered by politics. Companies were failed, merged, disassembled, suffered systematic removal of layers of management. Meanwhile the JApanese and European governments followed a path of feeding their turkey companies increasing subsidies or refusing to let them fail or be disassembled. They chose this year's economic security by damaging their future economic freedom. Now with their harvest of inefficiency, high unemployment, slow growth, lack of innovation etc, these countries are just jealous and are turning protectionist. What is worse for them is that with the net, CNN, movies, etc it is probably obvious to the whole younger generation that their governments have damaged their economic future.
One of the few areas where they shined was in cell phones. Now, it is just too much for them to accept that US is catching up there too due to superior technology.
So as the proud EURO sinks from $1.15 toward $1.05, and the Brits say that perhaps they would prefer to be in the North America trade group than in EURO land. We find the Chinese (and probably others too) trying desparately to steal intelectual property.
You can't really blame them. They just have no venture capital system to catalize inovation. How can they ever catch up?
As an example, few realize that during the 1940's Brazil was recognized as one of the world's leading economies. Did you ever wonder just why all the Nazi's went to Brazil. Well, for the last 50 years, Brazil slipped a % or 2 behind each year. So now they area second rate economy. I see the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Asians trying desparately to avoid this fate.
John G |
