The Economist was founded in opposition to tariffs and mercantilism.
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Mercantilism is its priority, not fixing the region's many problems.
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The EU and Japan share America's desire to constrain Chinese mercantilism.
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The failure to stop Chinese mercantilism severely damaged the U.S. workforce.
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Mr. Trump's mercantilism is among his oldest and steadiest public positions.
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Neo-mercantilism is both damaging and unworkable in today's global economy.
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A policy of culinary mercantilism could make dining out very dull indeed.
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It, too, faces big obstacles—notably deep Indian suspicion of Chinese mercantilism.
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Rather, he simply objects to mercantilism on the part of the Chinese.
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So why not just drop the mercantilism and let the good times roll?
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It is as though the 18th century concept of mercantilism has been revived.
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Since three of the world's largest trading nations (China, Germany, Japan) practice mercantilism (i.e.
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This very mercantilism has not only undermined the concept of free trade but destroyed it.
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The deal looks good for America only through the distorting prism of the president's mercantilism.
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More important, the president's mercantilism blinds him to the damage he could inflict on America.
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It might also shove the world economy back towards mercantilism and competing spheres of economic influence.
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Most of prior human history is a tale of economic mercantilism, political conflict and repeated war.
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The winner -- at least in the terms of crude mercantilism favoured by some -- could be Europe.
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But a whack-a-mole strategy alone won't be enough; China's mercantilism is simply too pervasive.
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The winner — at least in the terms of crude mercantilism favored by some — could be Europe.
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Back then, "America First" sounded like old-fashioned isolationism, or maybe even some sort of mercantilism.
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Some in the Trump administration see steel as part of a much bigger problem of Chinese mercantilism.
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Such thinking has traditionally been known as "mercantilism" and it is easy to see why it appeals.
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Trump's vision for muscular American mercantilism relies on mystification about the real conditions shaping work and income.
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"The WTO and its predecessor … were not designed to successfully manage mercantilism on this scale," Lighthizer said.
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Today's Panglossians argue that American "free trade" in a world bent on mercantilism will be good for Americans.
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But it was an enlightened form of mercantilism, creating a process that led to generally good economic outcomes.
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I will not let anyone sacrifice its structures on the altar of a highly cynical and ruthless mercantilism.
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A tit-for-tat trade war will unleash destructive mercantilism, which lurks everywhere, not just in the White House.
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It will not satisfy some American negotiators who have fumed about China's industrial policies, calling them mercantilism gone wild.
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Drezner acknowledges that there is some hypocrisy in China taking up this mantle, since the nation itself practices mercantilism.
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Macron should not pick a fight with Germany because, acting alone, he can do nothing about changing Germany's mercantilism.
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Mercantilism, the dominant economic theory of the early modern period, held that hunger incentivized work and kept wages low.
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When trade agreements focused mostly on tariff and non-tariff barriers at the border, mercantilism produced some salutary consequences.
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This failed deal is just the first of many that will be tested in a new age of mercantilism.
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But he seems less willing than his predecessor to enforce a rules-based order; his transactional mercantilism will reassure China.
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The trade truce had looked shaky enough anyway, based as it was on mercantilism and a promise to talk more.
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All that because the United States' long-overdue decision to cut its excessive trade imbalances runs counter to Germany's mercantilism.
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And yes, a poorly conceived American response to China's aggressive mercantilism could be damaging – but doing nothing could be even worse.
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The alternative is an open, rules-based and perhaps even democratic order, in which economies are shaped by markets, not mercantilism.
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The official justification for the tariffs is rooted in anger about Chinese mercantilism—anger which is shared across the rich world.
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Beijing started the "war" in the 1990s with its mercantilism and serially unkept commitments on market access and intellectual property protection.
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America feels that China, the world's biggest exporter, has used the WTO to provide legal cover for a policy of mercantilism.
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This neo-mercantilism is being pursued at innumerable levels, but none is more definitional then the "One Belt, One Road" initiatives.
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They have come far from their early days as relics of mercantilism, but large companies embody interests that Washington cannot ignore.
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Tariffs may ultimately not be the right weapon against Chinese mercantilism — invoking investment and capital market restrictions may be more effective.
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Mr Trump's mercantilism is long-held and could prove fierce, particularly if the strong dollar pushes America's trade deficit higher (see article).
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Without its fetters on unilateral action, Washington could also aggressively use its own trade laws to fight individual cases of foreign mercantilism.
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President Trump recognizes this mercantilism and understands that the U.S. must be similarly strategic and not succumb to naive free-trade mythology.
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The first step, then, should be for a strategic infrastructure plan that directs spending toward U.S. companies, rather than rewarding foreign mercantilism.
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So far Trump has induced free-trading Republicans to sound like protectionists, and once-libertarian Republicans to nod along to his mercantilism.
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Our allies increasingly recognize China's mercantilism and its goal to dominate artificial intelligence and other critical technologies by 2025 is a big threat.
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Nonetheless, calls are growing in the United States and Europe for reciprocal market treatment in response to what they see as Beijing's mercantilism.
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Second, the choice should not be between rolling back China's notorious practice of innovation mercantilism or spurring more innovation and productivity at home.
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That means addressing protectionism, mercantilism, prohibitions against foreign entities competing in certain sectors which we first saw in Japan and then in China.
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Like neo-mercantilism, or for that matter supply-side economics, this view has been debunked many times — I wrote about it in 1987!
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Most disappointing, Mr. Trump has met with China's president, Xi Jinping, twice without extracting a meaningful policy concession on that country's blatant mercantilism.
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Economists persuaded governments to abandon mercantilism by demonstrating that trade barriers imposed higher prices on the masses while narrowly benefiting those sheltered from competition.
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Does a world defined by spheres of influence and mercantilism benefit China, allowing it greater sway over Asia and freedom from Western economic dominance?
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"The president spoke loud and clear: the era of trade compromised by massive state intervention, subsidies, closed markets and mercantilism is ending," Lighthizer said.
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The shift from mercantilism to capitalism in the nineteenth century was accompanied by economic growth in Western, colonizing nations, but not enslaved or colonized populations.
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The dangers stem from the muddled mercantilism that lies behind his attitude to business and in the tactics that he uses to achieve his goals.
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In May, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin denounced what he called 'highly cynical and ruthless mercantilism' and accused FIFA of selling the soul of the game.
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The Hamiltonian mercantilism of America's first century allowed us to develop major industries behind tariff walls shielding our industries from eradication by stronger European competitors.
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I hope to be wrong here, but I fear that President-elect Trump has abandoned the Republican pro-market stand to embrace an old-fashioned mercantilism.
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But he expressed doubt about the WTO's ability either to deal with Chinese mercantilism or to reach any agreements at its next ministerial meeting in December.
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A Lannister always pays his debts, sure, but they only do so because of crony mercantilism that lines their pockets at the expense of hardworking Westerosi!
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As a new age of mercantilism has emerged alongside Mr. Trump's presidency, one deal that could have been a triumph of global capitalism has faded away.
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A more realistic assessment would be that the meeting produced a truce based on two elements: some murky mercantilism, and a deal to talk about a deal.
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China has begun to fill the global power vacuum created by Trump's abdication, while U.S. protectionism allows Xi Jinping to deflect justified criticisms of Beijing's own mercantilism.
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It's veering between empty reaffirmations of old bonds (Pence) and the scattershot anti-Muslim, Sweden-syndrome, anti-trade, bellicose, what's-in-it-for-me mercantilism of Trump.
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It was reasonable to criticise Japan for its mercantilism, but clearly wrong to portray a democracy and an American ally as a threat to America's way of life.
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In spite of Washington's clumsiness, or worse, the world sees the huge bilateral trade imbalance China created without much concern for political problems raised by its aggressive mercantilism.
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This is where Mr Trump is dangerous with his threats of trade (and actual) war and his philosophy of mercantilism (which has been dismissed by economists since 1776).
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Mr Cohn, who is widely seen as having held Mr Trump's mercantilism at bay, quit the administration on March 6th as it became clear that tariffs were imminent.
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Instead, solving challenges like China's rampant "innovation mercantilism" and its overcapacity in metals requires that America work in concert with its allies to aggressively confront these damaging practices.
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And instead of dismissing Trump's efforts, policy experts at the Economic Policy Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation have devised their own responses to Chinese mercantilism.
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Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, was also an early proponent, arguing in 2010 that such a measure could help the United States deal with Chinese mercantilism.
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The short life span of the deal can be blamed in large part on national barriers — which are likely to rise even further as a new mercantilism emerges.
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Trump's agenda of mercantilism and a chauvinistic welfare state is a genuinely new agenda, but it is unclear to what extent it will take hold in Republican politics.
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His economic promises, such as they are, amount to a kind of piratical mercantilism: He will wrest wealth from weaker peoples and share it among the volk at home.
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The administration must make good on its promised efforts to contain Chinese mercantilism, particularly on intellectual property theft and other market barriers like mandatory partnerships and forced technology transfers.
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" Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution compared Trump's trade policies to Herbert Hoover's, and in The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey accused Trump of initiating a "pointless, destructive round of mercantilism.
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The president "launched the trade war against China and said, 'We are going to remake the economy and get the state out of industrial policy and mercantilism,'" Irwin said.
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During much of the nineteenth century, free-market liberalism was contrasted with the old orders of privilege, systems like feudalism and mercantilism in which proximity to political power meant wealth.
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Militarism and mercantilism constitute a new policy, unconstrained by any consideration of what the United States stands for in the world or the values its alliances have defended since 1945.
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The TPP is a line in the sand to our competitors, a resounding message that fairness and openness – not mercantilism and protectionism – must be the hallmarks of 21st Century trade.
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In many ways, these measures are a form of mercantilism for the interests of firms in leading economic sectors, rather than "free trade" that would create more competition and lower prices.
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One example of this "innovation mercantilism" is China's use of new cybersecurity laws which force foreign technology firms to hand over valuable IP and source code in return for permission to operate.
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As an aside, one should also note that the White House should come in on this, because the German-Dutch mercantilism is killing the markets which take a quarter of American exports.
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The dangers stem, first, from the muddled mercantilism that lies behind his attitude to business, and, second, in the tactics—buying off and attacking individual companies—that he uses to achieve his goals.
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The sloppy Tucker Max masculinity of the early aughts has adopted a smooth Seth Cohen sheen, infused with the data-driven mercantilism of Silicon Valley and the performative tastefulness of the indie sphere.
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But we are living in a world where, for the time being — and maybe for a long time to come, if secular stagnation theorists are right — mercantilism makes a fair bit of sense.
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It is "utter tosh" to imagine that strategic interests trump plain mercantilism in EU trade talks, says Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, a think-tank in Brussels.
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And to hear Mr Trump's team describe the summit, when it came to dealing with China, the president stuck to the hard-headed mercantilism that was one of his greatest hits on the campaign trail.
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The great 85033 experiment in reviving medieval mercantilism and realizing interwar dreams of national autarky has been a major flop, just as the thousands of merchants who begged Washington not to do this had predicted.
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But at least in the economic realm, he appears set to name someone respected by investors and likely to continue to carry the banner of free trade in an administration tilting of late to mercantilism.
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However, the plans were strongly opposed by clubs and leagues in Europe and UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said the plans were 'highly cynical and ruthless mercantilism' and accused FIFA of selling the soul of the game.
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Inept economic management is one of the possibilities, but the experience shows that they just want to hitch a free ride on the "locomotive U.S.A." That's called beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilism of export-driven growth economies.
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It has worked diligently with the United States and the European Union to modify the operations and rules of the World Trade Organization, clearly aiming at addressing the Chinese flaunting of rules and its growing mercantilism.
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Free-trade liberals of the 19th century explicitly framed their laissez-faire philosophy as a challenge to mercantilism, the forerunner of corporate capitalism, based as it was on the unholy marriage of corporate and government power.
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China has at best had an ambivalent attitude to free trade — just look at its qualified support for the World Trade Organization, its opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its own long history of mercantilism.
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With some nations exercising mercantilism — predatory export pricing and massive protectionism at home — and not following the rules of trade agreements in place, we are essentially already in a trade war and have been for two decades.
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There is a faint hope that Mr Trump's advisers and allies will play good cop to his bad cop, using tariffs as a bargaining chip in rewriting global trading rules to constrain China's mercantilism—a legitimate goal.
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Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 still stinks to me of both corporate hubris (that asinine "courage" remark) and plain mercantilism (who owns the number one wireless headphone company in the world?
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If the United States has forsaken these ideals, if the nation of "We the people" is no longer a universal idea but projects only a pay-up-now mercantilism, Germany will one day have to think again.
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This is a sad story of how one transforms an unassailable case against China's rampant mercantilism into a humiliating retreat and acquiescence into a continuation of hundreds of billions dollars of American wealth and technology transfers to China.
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But such pledges have done little to allay the concerns of China's trade partners, and there are growing calls in the United States and Europe for equal market treatment in response to what they see as Beijing's mercantilism.
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China has perfected this mercantilism, to the point where it now dumps products like steel on the world market at below the cost of production — all in a successful bid to put rival American companies out of business.
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Leveraging these advantages to build the future, standing up to Chinese mercantilism and working with allies like South Korea to promote free, reciprocal and fair trade around the world will position the United States to lead the 21st century.
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But stopping the increase of trade deficits is only part of what the U.S. should have obtained had Trump succeeded in changing the selfish mercantilism of those two large economic systems that account for about one-fifth of the world economy.
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He is going to deliver on his promise to have massive trade reform and make sure that we actually live in a world where free and fair trade is the dominant form of trade, not trade mercantilism and predatory pricing.
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And in that world of mercantilism there is a fundamental conflict between the goal of building strong, widely shared prosperity in the United States, and the current actions of our corporations, whose aim is to maximize their profit first and foremost.
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Much as Mexico's trade surplus with the U.S. has been growing, it is not because the country hones Trump-like trade mercantilism ("exports good, imports bad"), takes advantage of the U.S. or generally runs a big trade surplus with the world.
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One thing it does is create the possibility that protectionism will be bad mercantilism — that even in its first-round effects it will actually destroy more domestic jobs than it creates, because it creates a competitive disadvantage for domestic downstream producers.
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Disneyland visitors who know what they're looking for take note of the lamp burning in the partially shaded window above the fire station on Main Street (which is, despite its naked mercantilism, still the most beguiling of the many "lands").
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As William Burns, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former deputy secretary of state, said in a speech in May: "a nasty brew of mercantilism, unilateralism and unreconstructed nationalism" has bubbled to the surface under Trump.
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He became the first Japanese royal to study abroad, spending two years at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, writing a thesis on medieval mercantilism on the River Thames, before returning to Tokyo and his alma mater, Gakushuin University, for doctoral studies.
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First of all we have to realize that the world that we live in is not a world of free trade; it is a world of mercantilism, a world in which many foreign governments do whatever it takes to make their industries succeed.
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Even without his promised pivot to mercantilism and trade war, a White House run as a Trump production is likely to mainline anxiety into the economy, sidelining capital, discouraging hiring and shaving points off the G.D.P. The second peril is major civil unrest.
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Addressing this challenge — as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation writes in its recent report, "Stopping China's Mercantilism: A Doctrine of Constructive, Alliance-Backed Confrontation" — will require President Trump to elevate U.S.-China trade issues to a central focus of both U.S. economy policymaking and diplomatic relations.
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The great powers of bygone centuries subscribed to the economic theory of mercantilism, "Wherein we must ever observe this rule: to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value," as its apostle, the East India Company director Thomas Mun, wrote in the 21s.
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This is particularly true because after the coronavirus epidemic is under control, key U.S. industries will continue to face perhaps an even more pressing threat in China's predatory brand of innovation mercantilism, which is designed to gain global dominance in an array of advanced technology industries.
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Somehow, Beijing officials seem to have chosen to use sloganeering as a substitute for a prompt and decisive action to sharply narrow their excessive trade surpluses with the U.S. — a policy that would have deprived Washington of any legitimate reason to seek relief from damages caused by China's aggressive mercantilism.
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In a blistering 35-page report submitted to the U.S.-China Security Economic and Security Review Commission in 2010, Lighthizer systematically dismantles the arguments made by proponents of China's accession to the WTO, and points to evidence of China's mercantilism that has come at the expense of the United States.
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Mercantilism is an outdated economic strategy that motivated Adam SmithDavid (Adam) Adam SmithWarren's pledge to avoid first nuclear strike sparks intense pushback Landmark US-Russia arms control treaty poised for final blow Young Democrats look to replicate Ocasio-Cortez's primary path MORE to write the Wealth of Nations in 1776.
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Merkel has done so much to weaken Europe with calamitous fiscal austerity, economically lethal mercantilism, refusal to support and enhance Europe's growth and employment, the chaos of an open-door immigration policy and a rejection of reform measures designed to strengthen the EU and advance the epochal project of the European economic and political union.
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As for what we should actually hope for – well, the midpoint of each axis, the center of the matrix, seems like the sweet spot for the country: A Trump presidency that's competent-enough without being dictatorial, and that provides a needed populist corrective to conservatism without taking us all the way to mercantilism or a debt crisis.
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"This trend towards mercantilism, in other words we want to do all of our business domestically and try to keep trade to a minimum, has the potential to reverse that pendulum that swung in favor of globalization, in favor of higher productivity, in favor of lower prices and start to shift that the other way," he said.
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We fought a revolution in part against the mercantilism that prevailed in Britain, where the king and members of Parliament played favorites and people who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the government did business with companies in which powerful politicians had an interest (the South Sea Company and the East India Company were the two most notorious examples).
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"And I'll just conclude by saying most of the issues that we're dealing with today are induced by bad political choices, making a bad decision about a new tax, creating tremendously difficult situation with Brexit, the immigration crisis in Germany, the mercantilism and state-owned enterprises in China, the tariffs that the United States put in unilaterally, " Smith said during a conference call with analysts.
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This was the argument of the radical liberal inventors of class analysis, who took up and advanced the liberal free-trade philosophy of Adam SmithDavid (Adam) Adam SmithWarren's pledge to avoid first nuclear strike sparks intense pushback Landmark US-Russia arms control treaty poised for final blow Young Democrats look to replicate Ocasio-Cortez's primary path MORE, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, and others as an escape from the rigged, elitist economic system of mercantilism.
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When Trump rounds on China, he sometimes seems to be encouraging a new "yellow peril," but his criticisms of China's trade practices challenge the market liberal framework that has turned a blind eye to Chinese mercantilism and to American firms that take advantage of China's cheap labor to export goods back to the United States that used to be produced in the US. Trump's remedies may not work, but his Republican rivals refused to recognize the problem he is addressing.
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BLANKFEIN: I THINK PEOPLE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE AT THE CENTER OF THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM, GOING BACK TO THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, GOING BACK TO THE DEPRESSION, GOING BACK TO THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF MERCANTILISM, HAVE ALWAYS FOUND THEIR MOMENTS OF VILIFICATION BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO BUILD THINGS, YOU CAN SEE IT, BUT THE PEOPLE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE TO MAKE SURE THE RIGHT THINGS GET BUILT IN THE RIGHT TIME AND THE RIGHT MONEY IS SPENT FOR IT AND WHEN MISTAKES ARE MADE AND THE WRONG THINGS ARE BUILT TO, REPOSSESS THOSE ASSETS AND RECYCLE THE CAPITAL, THEY'RE NOT ALWAYS LOVED.
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