>> THE F*CKING F*CKS
... let's watch Trump putting together his administration 2.0, and try to ...
- do MAGA without Team China-China-China's help
- do re-industrialising / re-infrastructurising absent the participation of the planet's #1 industrial player
- precluding Sino-Russia alliance by re-do China-China-China 1.0
- kneecapping Nafta partners once again
Recommendation: GetMoreGold, and more insta-gold / better-gold, BTC, both guesses
scmp.com
Trump asks Lighthizer, architect of US-China trade war tariffs, to be trade chief: report
Updated: 6:55am, 9 Nov 2024
As US trade representative, Lighthizer also played a major role in the renegotiation of Nafta with Mexico and Canada
Robert Lighthizer, who implemented then-US president and now president-elect Donald Trump’s trade war against China more than six years ago, has been tapped to reprise his role as US Trade Representative in Trump’s incoming administration, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
A strong proponent of tariffs as an effective tool to fight foreign subsidies and bolster American companies, Lighthizer has been one of the most frequent names to emerge in speculation over who Trump will pick for key economic cabinet positions. He was also seen as a possible candidate for commerce secretary.
He has been active in the tariffs debate in the years since leaving his post at the end of Trump’s first term, and never fully left the president-elect’s orbit as some other cabinet officials have.
Lighthizer is currently the chair of the Centre for American Trade at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank that draws on many Trump loyalists and insiders for recommendations on the transition to a second Trump administration, although the organisation was not an official arm of the president-elect’s campaign.
Last year, the former top trade negotiator published a book titled No Trade is Free, in which he argued for an escalation of the trade conflicts and tariff wars that characterised the Trump years.
Donald Trump secures enough Electoral College votes to win 2024 US presidential election
The book advocates for “strategic decoupling” from China, suggesting a bigger break with the world’s second-largest economy compared with the “de-risking” measures pushed by US President Joe Biden. The goal, he said, should be the elimination of trade deficit with China by repealing its normal trade status, in addition to more tariffs.
The US had a US$279 billion trade deficit with China last year, down US$343 billion in 2019, the first full year after USTR began slapping punitive tariffs on imports from the country, according to US government data.
“If Trump is serious about putting in place this pretty detrimental but radical overhaul of US trade policy, there’s no question that Lighthizer would be a loyal deputy in sort of seeing this thing come to fruition,” said Clark Packard, a research fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, who cautioned that it is not clear that Lighthizer would accept the position.
“Bob Lighthizer is a very good trade lawyer. If he’s the architect of these policies, I think that [the trade policy] will be vetted more seriously than if it was somebody who isn’t as as experienced in the ways of Washington and the law,” he said.
Packard added, however, that some of Lighthizer’s goals may conflict with other aspects of the policies that a second Trump administration might pursue.
“Lighthizer has talked about the need to devalue the dollar, to bolster US exports and help US manufacturing. But at the same time, they’re talking about doing things like corporate tax cuts, and that tends to strengthen the dollar,” he said.
“And so those things would work sort of cross purposes.”
From the end of the Civil War until 1900 … tariffs were a great success, exactly as Mr Trump claims.Lighthizer has recently sparred with the Wall Street Journal’s criticism of tariffs.
Last month, he said an editorial in the newspaper, which claimed that American economic growth in the second half of the 19th century occurred during times of falling tariffs, relied on “selective data choices” and had “fanciful views on US economic history”.
“During this great period of economic growth, when America created the largest economy in the world from the end of the Civil War until 1900, the average tariffs in this country were almost always above 40 per cent on dutiable goods,” he said. “Tariffs were a great success, exactly as Mr Trump claims.”
Lighthizer is at odds with some economists on this point.
The non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, for example, warned in September that Trump’s plans would lead to weaker economic growth, higher inflation and job losses.
Days later, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Trump’s fiscal proposals, including the tariffs, could add twice as much to the national debt compared to plans under Vice-President Kamala Harris, who conceded defeat in the US presidential election this week.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Thursday, Trump announced he had picked Susie Wiles, one of his two campaign managers, to be White House chief of staff.
In addition to the tariff war with China, which the administration of US President Joe Biden left largely in place, Lighthizer also led negotiations that yielded a revamped trade pact between the United States, Canada and Mexico, which took effect in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first administration.
My hope is that would have learned their lesson about the sort of political fallout that comes from inflation
Clark Packard, Cato Institute The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, includes tighter North American content rules for autos, new protections for intellectual property, prohibitions against currency manipulation and new rules on digital commerce.
Lighthizer’s career in trade negotiation and import blocking stretches back decades.
Prior to his USTR tenure, he had represented American steel companies as a trade lawyer, filing antidumping and countervailing duty petitions to curb imports of the industrial metal.
He served as deputy USTR for under former president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and negotiated “over two dozen bilateral international agreements, including agreements on steel, automobiles, and agricultural products”, according to his Georgetown University bio.
Asked whether Lighthizer’s deep expertise would be able to limit the upward pressure that tariffs would put on US consumer prices, a problem that plagued the Biden administration and helped to drag Harris’ approval ratings, Packard said Lighthizer’s legal acumen is stronger than his understanding of economics.
“Bob Lighthizer is not an economist. Bob Lighthizer is a lawyer,” he said. “My hope is that would have learned their lesson about the sort of political fallout that comes from inflation. People really don’t like high prices, it turns out.”
Robert Delaney
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief. He spent 11 years in China as a language student and correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires and Bloomberg, and continued covering the country as a correspondent and an academic after leaving. His debut novel, The Wounded Muse, draws on actual events that played out in Beijing while he lived there. |
