Recall the Bush administration didn't lift a damn finger on China's dumping practices.
The United States imported about $91 million worth of the product from China in 2008. Steel grating is used in industrial floors, docks, ramps, drainage covers, staircases and other applications.
The trade case is one of about a dozen brought by U.S. companies in 2009 against Chinese-made goods that they said have benefited from government subsidies or are being sold in the United States at less than fair value.
The Commerce Department said it set a preliminary anti-dumping duty of 14.36 percent on four Chinese producers or exporters in the steel grating investigations.
If anyone calls China an emerging economy, giving it special status via the WTO, they are nuts.
China is now about to overtake Japan as the second largest economy, behind only the U.S. and catching up fast.
China raised its 2008 growth estimate to 9.6 percent from 9 percent and said this year’s quarterly figures will increase, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy.
China raised its 2008 growth estimate to 9.6 percent from 9 percent and said this year’s quarterly figures will increase, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy.
Meanwhile Japan's economy contracted 1.2%, India, another emerging economy expanded 6.7% and the United States is just dripping along.
Shocks of all shocks the WTO ruled in the United States favor on China restricting U.S. imports, one of many, many unfair trade practices by China.
The World Trade Organization's top arbitrators upheld a ruling that China is illegally restricting imports of U.S. music, films and books, and Washington pushed forward with a new case accusing China of manipulating the prices for key ingredients in steel and aluminum production.
Monday's verdict by the WTO's appellate body knocked down China's objections to an August decision that came down decisively against Beijing's policy of forcing American media producers to route their business through state-owned companies.
If China fails over the next year to bring its practices in line with international trade law, the U.S. can ask the WTO to authorize commercial sanctions against Chinese goods.
It helps to read global newspapers because according to Shanghai Daily:
It is getting harder for governments to buy United States Treasuries because the US's shrinking current-account gap is reducing supply of dollars overseas, a Chinese central bank official said yesterday.
Overcapacity is a blight on China’s industrial landscape, affecting dozens of industries and wreaking far-reaching damage on the global economy
The reports says China's stimulus package has made this overcapacity much worse.
One of the problems is China dumps it's excess goods onto the market, selling them for much less than the cost to produce.
This hurts other national economies in terms of wiping out their domestic industries through unfair competition.
I think the report is a little polite, ignoring China's intentional and strategic market dumping and other strategies to capture yet another manufacturing sector for itself long term.
So what it's true? A Chinese official trashed our currency, so the dollar is down and gold reaches another high.
"The continuous depreciation in the dollar, and the U.S. government's indication that, in order to resume growth and maintain public confidence, it basically won't raise interest rates for the coming 12 to 18 months, has led to massive dollar arbitrage speculation," Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said Sunday in Beijing at the International Finance Forum, according to news reports.
This is a different type of gold rally, with support coming from both sides of the market -- investment [and] fundamental," said Darin Newsom, a senior analyst at Telvent DTN.
Who? What? CIC stands for the Chinese Investment Corporation. CIC is a sovereign wealth fund for the Chinese Government that is buying up natural resources all over the world. Yesterday it was announced that CIC is buying a 15% interest in AES, an American based power generation company:
A CIC unit will buy 125.5 million in new shares for $12.60 each, or $1.58 billion, Arlington, Virginia-based AES said today in a statement. CIC will own about 15 percent of the power company. AES also signed a letter of intent to sell a 35 percent interest in its wind-power operations to CIC for $571 million.
The emphasis on that last sentence was mine. Of course AES executives are spinning this as a great thing for the company:
Fortune Magazine put out an interesting article earlier this week. I wanted to quote a piece of it so you can get the idea.
Oil in Nigeria (and the Congo and Brazil and Kazakhstan and ...). Natural gas in Iran. Iron ore in Australia. China's hunt for natural resources around the globe, which began in earnest earlier this decade, has intensified as never before.
In September alone, China's sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corp. (CIC), shelled out nearly $1 billion to buy an 11% stake in JSC KazMunaiGas Exploration Production, a Kazakhstan oil and gas company. Just a week earlier CIC paid $850 million to acquire 14.9% of Noble Group, the Hong Kong commodity-trading powerhouse. Earlier this summer the China Development Bank lent Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company, $10 billion to help fund exploration in deep waters off Brazil.
Sometimes you wonder if Larry Summers is reading the blogs. The catch phrase Financial Balance of Terror has been coined by none other than 1990's Financial Terror Architect, Obama economic adviser Larry Summers!
President Barack Obama and fellow Group of 20 leaders are trying to end what Obama adviser Lawrence Summers has called the “financial balance of terror.”
World leaders, meeting in Pittsburgh last week, adopted a framework for more durable economic growth as they sought to prevent a replay of the worst crisis since the Great Depression. They also acknowledged the growing clout of China and other emerging economies by giving them a bigger voice in decision- making.
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