Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
We did not have a single problem that we did not or could not solve in the USA before NAFTA,China,and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Once you change the laws so you can move money, patents and technology at the speed of light around the world countries become irrelevant and begin the long or short decent into chaos.
Dunno Glass-Steagal, but Germany happens to be quite fine with China and EU free trade.

The U.S. problems have been exposed and magnified by trade liberalisation, not created.

You guys weren't capable of producing cars that fit the European market back in the 30's, you didn't learn it in the 50's and back in the 70's you pretty much gave up. Later on you invented SUVs, but the European SUV market is now dominated by non-U.S. companies. The only U.S. carmaker with products developed in the U.S. and capable for the world market is the 4wd niche company Jeep.
That's a snapshot, but it's a representative one.

Your services stuff is competitive, most of your industry isn't.
A pipe system water flow regulator-producing company somewhere deep in a German rural area is more adapted to the world market than all U.S. companies that you and I would recognise.

The U.S. needs to produce 20-25% more goods to afford its goods consumption (not gonna happen, especially as long as there's such a resistance to resource efficiency intitiatives) or it need to crash the goods consumption of its middle class by at least a third (the rich people won't cut back and the poor people cannot).
You think this was a bad crisis? It's the foreshock.


That's the result of a refusal to think beyond the own market's (perceived) culture and refusal to develop world market-quality goods.
The free trade exposed and punished this, but without it you'd have rotten in your inefficiencies as the USSR did in its COMECON economic capsule. Globalisation is barely the catalysator for the downfall.


Shape up in regard to export-relevant manufacturing (= for export or for substituting imports) and you could rip off foreign trade partners with market dominance instead of getting ripped several new ones by Chinese companies.


Small anecdote:

I was monitoring a the European market for a specific product. Someday I got into contact with a U.S. company which said it was leading on the U.S. market and intended to export to Europe. They sent samples to me.
I refused to do anything with the samples, as they were defect (that was 100% not a transport issue and it took me about a second to learn about the disastrous quality issue).
They produced new samples, sent them over and I relayed them to a lab for tests. The product was below average in quality, while they believed it to be top notch. They closed that whole business unit a few months later.
Without these tests -without this exposure to competition- they would have kept producing their low quality stuff for years.


There are a couple good U.S. goods export companies and your services exports are about 110% of your services imports, but in the end the U.S. manufacturing sector has badly failed. That wasn't about exchange rates or wages; it was about competence. Many of your companies got smashed on the world markets by companies which had worse exchange rates, higher taxes and comparable wages.