Category: Free Markets

Chinese Communists Have Failed to Reform Toward Free Markets

(p. B6) China is the only major world economy reporting any economic growth today. It went first into Covid-19 and was first out, grinding out 3.2% growth in the most recent quarter while the U.S. shrank 9.5% and other advanced economies endured double-digit declines. High-tech monitoring, comprehensive testing and aggressive top-down containment measures enabled China to get the virus under control while others struggled. The Middle Kingdom may even deliver a modest year-over-year economic expansion in 2020.

This rebound is real, but behind the short-term numbers the economic restart is dubious. China’s growth spurt isn’t the beginning of a robust recovery but an uneven bounce fueled by infrastructure construction.

. . .

An honest look at the forces behind China’s growth this year shows a doubling down on state-managed solutions, not real reform. State-owned entities, or SOEs, drove China’s investment-led recovery.

. . .

For years, the world has watched and waited for China to become more like a free-market economy, thereby reducing American security concerns. At a time of profound stress world-wide, the multiple gauges of reform we have been monitoring through the China Dashboard point in the opposite direction. China’s economic norms are diverging from, rather than converging with, the West’s. Long-promised changes detailed at the beginning of the Xi era haven’t materialized.

Though Beijing talks about “market allocation” efficiency, it isn’t guided by what mainstream economists would call market principles. The Chinese economy is instead a system of state capitalism in which the arbiter is an uncontestable political authority. That may or may not work for China, but it isn’t what liberal democracies thought they would get when they invited China to take a leading role in the world economy.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Rosen, and Kevin Rudd. “China Backslides on Economic Reform.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, September 23, 2020): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sep. 22, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

“The Last Bastion of Freedom in the Chinese-Speaking World”

(p. A14) The new security rules for Hong Kong that China passed this week — without input from the city’s Beijing-backed leadership — have made Mr. Xi’s promise of autonomy under the “one country, two systems” framework seem hollow. And it has raised fears that China will move more aggressively to bring Taiwan, too, under its control.

. . .

In recent weeks, China has buzzed Taiwan’s territorial airspace almost daily. It accused Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, of carrying out a “separatist plot” by speaking at an international democracy forum. It has warned the Taiwan government to stop providing shelter to Hong Kong political activists, who are flocking to what they call the last bastion of freedom in the Chinese-speaking world.

For the full story, see:

Javier C. Hernández and Steven Lee Myers. “Taiwan Sees Ominous Signs for Its Own Autonomy.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 2, 2020): A14-A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 1, 2020, and has the title “As China Strengthens Grip on Hong Kong, Taiwan Sees a Threat.”)

Despite Global Trading Routes, in Year 1000 Most Ordinary People Rejected the Unfamiliar

(p. C8) Valerie Hansen’s “The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began” is a gripping account of exploration and ingenuity, sweeping across the economic alliances and great networks of trade that connected disparate regions around the globe. By touching down in different parts of the world at that precise moment, Ms. Hansen reveals the social and economic changes that linked individuals and societies in astonishing ways.

. . .

People navigated along the trading routes from China to the Persian Gulf and East Africa, and from Scandinavia to North America and the Caspian Sea, long before da Gama, Magellan and Columbus. But for most ordinary people life was still circumscribed. Globalization in 1000 may have opened the world to rulers—and busy ports and cities like Quanzhou and Bukhara may have hosted culturally and religiously diverse populations—but there was little sense of a wider, cosmopolitan embrace of a common humanity. “The most important lesson we can learn from our forebears is how best to react to the unfamiliar,” Ms. Hansen writes. “Those who remained open to the unfamiliar did much better than those who rejected anything new.”

For the full review, see:

Karin Altenberg. “Setting The Globe Spinning.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 23, 2020): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 22, 2020, and has the title “The Year 1000’ Review: Setting the Globe Spinning.”)

The book under review is:

Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner, 2020.

In Past Decade Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Makers Grow from Five to 250

(p. D1) According to the Fine Chocolate Industry Association, sales of premium chocolates grew 19 percent in 2018, compared with 0.6 percent for mainstream chocolate like the classic Hershey bar. Over the past decade, the number of small American bean-to-bar chocolate producers — the kind with cacao percentages and places of origin printed on those hyper-chic labels — has jumped from about five to more than 250.

. . .

(p. D4) The cacao beans (also called cocoa beans) are the seeds that grow inside the pod, surrounded by fleshy, juicy fruit that tastes a little like a mango crossed with a pear that was carrying a lychee. After harvesting, the beans are fermented for up to a week to develop their flavors, and dried.

To make chocolate, the dried beans are roasted, then cracked to separate the outer husks from the inner nibs, which have a nutty, earthy flavor and crunchy texture — and are excellent added to baked goods. The nibs are about half cocoa solids and half cocoa butter.

Chocolate makers grind the nibs into what’s called chocolate liquor, or chocolate paste. This liquor is ground again, along with sugar and other ingredients that might include milk powder to make milk chocolate, lecithin to smooth the texture, or vanilla for flavor.

. . .

The new wave of craft chocolate began with Scharffen Berger, founded in 1996 by Mr. Scharffenberger, a winemaker, and Robert Steinberg, who had studied at the famous chocolate shop Bernachon, in Lyon, France.

“When we started, there were only nine companies grinding their own cacao in the United States and they were all huge, except for Guittard,” Mr. Scharffenberger said, referring to the Guittard Chocolate Company, also in the San Francisco area. “We were the first new chocolate maker on the scene in 150 years.”

When Gary Guittard, the company’s fourth-generation owner, sampled some of Scharffen Berger’s chocolate, it spurred him to revamp his own production, in some cases going back to the way his great-grandfather made chocolate when he started the company in 1868.

“Scharffen Berger was the disrupter,” Mr. Guittard said. “Trying their chocolate was just terrible for me. It opened my eyes to a world of flavors that had been present in our chocolates 50 years ago, but that were lost. We had to change everything to get them back.”

Scharffen Berger was sold in 2005 to the Hershey Company, which moved the operation to Illinois. But other small bean-to-bar makers quickly followed Scharffen Berger’s lead. There are now more than 250 in the United States. And even though Brooklyn, contrary to popular belief, didn’t invent the bean-to-bar craze, it has several producers, including Kahkow, Cacao Prieto, Jacques Torres, Raaka and Fine & Raw.

. . .

A bean-to-bar maker makes chocolate from cacao beans. A chocolatier buys premade chocolate, then melts it and combines it with other ingredients to make confections like truffles or pralines. And this isn’t at all a bad thing: The best chocolatiers buy superb bean-to-bar chocolate as a starting point. (Many professional chocolatiers buy from Valrhona.) It’s just that making chocolate and making chocolate confections are two different skill sets.

For the full story, see:

Melissa Clark. “From Bean To Bar And Beyond.” The New York Times (Wednesday, February 12, 2020): D1 & D4-D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Feb. 13, 2020, and has the title “Everything You Don’t Know About Chocolate.”)

Cheering Entrepreneurs “Because They’ve Lived the American Dream”

(p. B1) Wall Street’s disdain for the bottom-up populist campaigns of Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont has gotten a lot of attention. The candidates’ full-throated attacks on corporate greed, extreme wealth and banking excesses are backed up by ambitious plans to upend the industry’s everyday operations.

Wariness extends far beyond an elite financial fellowship, though, to many small and medium-size businesses whose executives are not reflexively Republican but worry that the ascendancy of a left-wing Democrat would create an anti-business climate.

. . .

Michael Brady, the owner of two employment franchises in Jacksonville, Fla., is one of the independent business executives interviewed who feel unappreciated. “I get up before 6 o’clock every morning and work hard,” he said. “I put 200 people to work every week.”

Mr. Brady, 53, said he voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Mr. Trump in 2016. Since then, he said, some of the president’s actions and “some of his tweets” have made him cringe.

He said he could vote for a Democrat this year. But he finds several of the economic proposals from the party’s left wing off-putting, mentioning free college tuition and a nationwide $15-an-hour minimum wage.

What particularly irks Mr. Brady, though, are some of Ms. Warren’s statements about successful entrepreneurs’ not having built their businesses entirely on their own. Attacks on the country’s wealthy elite have also grated.

“When did the word millionaire or billionaire become a bad word?” he asked. “I cheer those people on because they’ve lived the American dream.”

For the full story, see:

Patricia Cohen. “Employers Are Leery Of Warren And Sanders.” The New York Times (Saturday, January 18, 2020): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 17, 2020, and has the title “Trump Fans or Not, Business Owners Are Wary of Warren and Sanders.”)

Princeton Economist Blinder Wrongly Forecast Huge Offshoring of Jobs

(p. A1) A widely covered 2007 study by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist and former Clinton administration official, estimated that a quarter or more of jobs were vulnerable within the next decade. But many companies discovered that labor savings were offset by other factors: time differences, language barriers, legal hurdles and the simple challenge of coordinating work half a world (p. A14) away. In some cases, companies decided they were better off moving jobs to less expensive parts of the United States rather than out of the country.

“Where in retrospect I missed the boat is in thinking that the gigantic gap in labor costs between here and India would push it to India rather than to South Dakota,” Mr. Blinder said in a recent interview. “There were other aspects of the costs to moving the activities that we weren’t thinking about very much back then when people were worrying about offshoring.”

. . .

In a follow-up paper released Friday [Sept. 27, 2019], another economist, Adam Ozimek, revisited Mr. Blinder’s analysis to see what had happened over the past decade. Some job categories that Mr. Blinder identified as vulnerable, like data-entry workers, have seen a decline in United States employment. But the ranks of others, like actuaries, have continued to grow.

Over all, of the 26 occupations that Mr. Blinder identified as “highly offshorable” and for which Mr. Ozimek had data, 15 have added jobs over the past decade and 11 have cut them. Altogether, those occupations have eliminated fewer than 200,000 jobs over 10 years, hardly the millions that many feared. A second tier of jobs — which Mr. Blinder labeled “offshorable” — has actually added more than 1.5 million jobs.

For the full story, see:

Ben Casselman. “White-Collar Jobs Were Supposed to Go Overseas. They Didn’t.” The New York Times (Monday, September 30, 2019): A1 & A14.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “The White-Collar Job Apocalypse That Didn’t Happen.”)

The Alan Blinder paper mentioned above, is:

Blinder, Alan. “How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?” Princeton University, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Policy Studies, Working Paper # 142, March 2007.

The “follow-up paper” mentioned above, is:

Ozimek, Adam. “Overboard on Offshore Fears.” 2019. https://www.upwork.com/press/economics/report-overboard-on-offshore-fears/

Sand from Greenland’s Global Warming Can Help World Make Concrete

(p. A8) A few miles up the Sermilik Fjord in southwestern Greenland, the water has abruptly turned milky, a sign that it is loaded with suspended silt, sand and other sediment.

It is this material — carried here in a constant plume of meltwater from the Sermeq glacier at the head of the fjord — that Mette Bendixen, a Danish scientist at the University of Colorado, has come to see. As their research boat moves farther into the murky water, she and several colleagues climb into a rubber dinghy to take samples.

Dr. Bendixen, a geomorphologist, is here to investigate an idea, one that she initially ran by colleagues to make sure it wasn’t crazy: Could this island, population 57,000, become a provider of sand to billions of people?

Sand for eroded beaches, potentially from the Rockaways to the Riviera. Sand to be used as bedding for pipes, cables and other underground infrastructure. Mostly, though, sand for concrete, to build the houses, highways and harbors of a growing world.

The world makes a lot of concrete, more than 10 billion tons a year, and is poised to make much more for a population that is forecast to grow by more than 25 percent by 2050. That makes sand, which is about 40 percent of concrete by weight, one of the most-used commodities in the world, and one that is becoming harder to come by in some regions.

But because of the erosive power of ice, there is a lot of sand in Greenland. And with climate change accelerating the melting of Greenland’s mile-thick ice sheet — a recent study found that melting has increased sixfold since the 1980s — there is going to be a lot more.

“It’s not rocket science,” Dr. Bendixen said. “One part of the world has something that other parts of the world are lacking.”

For the full story, see:

Henry Fountain. “Melting Greenland Is Awash in Sand.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 4, 2019): A8.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 1, 2019, and has the same title as the print version.)

With Tariffs, What Goes Around Comes Around

(p. A1) CLYDE, Ohio—After the Trump administration announced new tariffs on imported washing machines in January, Marc Bitzer, the chief executive of Whirlpool Corp., celebrated his win over South Korean competitors LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

“This is, without any doubt, a positive catalyst for Whirlpool,” he said on an investor conference call.

Nearly six months later, the company’s share price is down 15%. One factor is a separate set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, imposed by the U.S. in March and later expanded, that helped drive up Whirlpool’s raw-materials costs. Net income, even with the added benefit of a lower tax bill, was down $64 million in the first quarter compared with a year earlier.

. . .

(p. A10) Whirlpool had campaigned for protection from what it called unfair foreign competition. Things became more complicated as the trade conflict spread beyond its industry.

“Raw-material costs have risen substantially,” Mr. Bitzer said on the April investor call, primarily blaming steel and aluminum tariffs. Most of the 200-pound weight of a washing machine is in its steel and aluminum parts.

For the full story, see:

Andrew Tangel and Josh Zumbrun. “From Washer Tariffs to Trade Showdown.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 17, 2018): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 16, 2018, and has the title “Whirlpool Wanted Washer Tariffs. It Wasn’t Ready for a Trade Showdown.”)

Roger Koppl Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Diamond shows us that entrepreneurial innovation is not just the best way to make a better world. It is the only way. If we care about our fellow humans, then we had better do what we can to enable entrepreneurial innovation. Diamond shows with an unusual depth and breadth of scholarship that the most important thing we can do to promote innovation is to let entrepreneurs test their impossible ideas in the free market. Diamond’s book is a gem. Grab it, read it, learn from it.

Roger Koppl, Professor of Finance, Syracuse University. Author of Expert Failure and other works.

Koppl’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

“Protectionist Trade Policies Can Backfire” on Those They Are Intended to Protect

(p. B1) You may not have appreciated it at the time — golden eras have a habit of coming and going like that — but a five-year stretch that started in 2013 was a pretty great time to buy a washing machine.
Inflation for home laundry equipment, as measured by the Labor Department, fell steadily during that time, which meant you could buy the same washer your neighbor bought last year for less money. Or you could buy a better one at the same price. Great news for your clothes, though maybe bad news for your friendship, if your neighbor was the covetous type.
That stretch of laundry deflation ended last year, shortly after President Trump imposed tariffs, starting at 20 percent, on imported washers. The move was a response to a complaint filed by Whirlpool, a Michigan-based manufacturer.
. . .
A year after Mr. Trump announced the tariffs, washing machine prices were up, as many analysts had expected. But that has not been a boon to the makers of washers because fewer Ameri-(p. B4)cans are investing in new laundry equipment, exposing how protectionist trade policies can backfire on the very companies they are meant to safeguard.
Tariffs of two varieties have pushed prices up
The washer-specific tariffs raised costs for importers like LG and Samsung. But another tariff issued by Mr. Trump, on imported steel, raised costs for some domestic manufacturers like Whirlpool, which took those companies by surprise.
Many manufacturers passed those higher costs on to consumers. Once stores worked their way through models that had been imported before tariffs hit, deflation gave way to sharp price increases.
After years of steady growth, sales reversed in 2018
A basic rule of economics is that when the price of something goes up, people buy less of it. That’s just what happened to washing machines.

For the full story, see:
Jim Tankersley. “Tariffs Tossed a Market Right Into a Spin Cycle.” The New York Times (Saturday, Jan. 26, 2019): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold and larger font in original.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 25, 2019, and has the title “‘How Tariffs Stained the Washing Machine Market.”)

Tariffs Evaded by Misclassification and Transshipment

(p. A1) One day in June [2018] , seven months after the U.S. imposed stiff tariffs on plywood from China, a wood importer in Oregon got a call from a supplier asking if he would like to get some Chinese plywood tariff-free.
How would that work, asked importer David Visse. The products carry an identification code that is checked by U.S. Customs agents.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Visse says the supplier told him. The plywood would be stripped of its Chinese markings, and “we’ll ship it under some other code.”
Every product imported into the U.S. carries a 10-digit designation called an HTS code, of which there are 18,927 in all. Like a taxonomic version of Noah’s Ark, the code provides a common language to bridge disparate markets and identify products in all their variety.
In a world of increasing tariffs, the code has another function: evading those levies. The business of code-fudging is expanding in step with tariff increases, undermining U.S. efforts to shield American business from foreign competition, according to importers, customs officials, trade attorneys and shipping brokers.
As trade conflict grows between the two largest economies, these professionals say, code misclassification is starting to compete (p. A10) with transshipment–the rerouting of goods through third countries–as a way to duck tariffs.

For the full story, see:
Chuin-Wei Yap. “Trade Fight Spurs Tariff Dodges, With 18,927 Options.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2018): A1 & A10.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 8, 2018, and has the title “The U.S.-China Trade Battle Spawns a New Era of Tariff Dodges.”)