Apr 11, 2019

By The Associated Press BEIJING (AP) — China said Thursday that trade talks with the U.S. are “moving forward” after nine rounds of consultations aimed at ending a standoff that has shaken the world economic outlook. The latest discussions had achieved “new substantial progress,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily news briefing. “We also feel that the consultation is moving forward. We hope that the two sides can continue to work together to properly address each other’s concerns on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit,” Lu said. Lu’s comments were echoed by those from Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng, who said “new progress” had been made at the talks. Gao said the sides were now in “close communications with all effective approaches.” “They will spare no efforts for the negotiations and working toward the direction of implementing the important consensus reached by both leaders,” Gao said at a weekly briefing. The three days of talks in Washington last week dealt with issues including technology transfer, intellectual property rights protection, non-tariff measures, agriculture and enforcement of agreements. Leading the delegations are U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders earlier said “significant work remains” before an agreement can be reached. The dispute centers on the Trump administration’s allegations that China steals technology and coerces U.S. companies to hand over trade secrets — all part of Beijing’s zeal to overtake U.S. technological dominance. To pressure China, the United States has imposed tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese goods. The Chinese have counterpunched by taxing $110 billion in U.S. imports. Forecasters at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, among others, have downgraded their outlook for the global economy in part because the U.S.-China rift is damaging trade and causing businesses to slow investment until they know how the dispute will end. Tensions have eased somewhat since Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Buenos Aires late last year and the administration ended up suspending its plans to raise tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports to buy time for...

Feb 4, 2019

“Manufacturers Added 6 Times More Jobs Under Trump Than Under Obama’s Last 2 Years”   By Chuck DeVore, Forbes The federal government released its first jobs report of 2019, showing that nonfarm payroll grew by 304,000 in January, far above economists’ consensus estimate of 170,000. The average monthly gain in 2018 was 223,000. Over the past year, average hourly earnings were up 3.2%. After revising its data for past periods, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment grew by 5.1 million jobs in President Trump’s first full two years in office, a 3.5% increase. Private sector payrolls grew by 4.9 million, a 4.0% increase. By comparison, over the same 24-month period, the economy added 5.0 million jobs in former President Obama’s last two years in office, with private sector employment up by 4.7 million. Significantly, growth in manufacturing jobs continued to show strength, with 13,000 jobs added in January. Over the past two years, with the encouragement of the Trump Administration’s red-tape cutting policies and the tax cut and reform law passed in December 2017, manufacturers added 467,000 jobs, more than six times the 73,000 manufacturing jobs added in Obama’s last two years. Looking at Trump’s first two years, the revised BLS data shows that more than two manufacturing jobs were added for every one job added in government at the federal, state, and local level. In contrast, under Obama, almost five government jobs were added for every one manufacturing job. Since Pres. Trump took office in January 2017, employment in manufacturing has increased 3.7%. Over the same period during the last two years under Pres. Obama, manufacturing payrolls grew by only 0.6%. The sluggish growth in manufacturing in the latter half of the Obama years led to President Obama remarking in June 2016 that manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.” Weeks after Trump’s election—and in response to candidate Trump’s promise to bring back manufacturing jobs—New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist, said, “Nothing policy can do will bring back those lost jobs. The service sector is the future of work; but nobody wants to hear it.” Trump’s deregulatory and tax policies have confounded his critics and benefited the...

Nov 26, 2018

By: Harry Moser, Reshoring Initiative Featured on Metal Forming Magazine.com  Harry Moser, retired president of machine-tool supplier GF AgieCharmilles, is founder and president of the Restoring Initiative, tel. 847/867-1144, www.reshoringnow.org. Manufacturing jobs returning to the United States from offshore climbed to 171,000 in 2017 for a staggering 2800-percent increase since 2010, and equaling 90 percent of the 189,000 total manufacturing jobs added in 2017. This brought the number of jobs returned to more than one-half million since 2010. With at least half of these jobs believed to be at various levels of the supply chain, opportunities are great for metalformers. Moreover, when measured by our $700 billion nonpetroleum goods trade deficit, we count five million U.S. manufacturing jobs offshore, representing a potential for 40-percent growth in U.S. manufacturing. The right national and corporate policies will bring these jobs back. Tariffs/Trade War vs. Alternative Actions The reduction in U.S. corporate tax rates and regulatory costs played a key role in bringing jobs back, and makes 2018 the right time for companies to reevaluate their offshoring decisions. The Reshoring Initiative supports the Trump administration’s trade objectives, but not the tariffs. We have offered the administration our Competitiveness Toolkit, which outlines and quantifies alternative actions. These are intended to avoid retaliation by other countries and to avoid making some domestic sectors more competitive at the expense of others—a result of the steel tariffs. Take Advantage of the Trend Metalformers can reshore in two ways: They can decide to source or produce components or tooling domestically; or they can supply parts or tooling to customers that have decided to reshore. Several trends drive the shift from offshoring to reshoring: the rising costs of offshore production; the impact of distance on quality, innovation, flexibility, responsiveness, inventory and availability; improved U.S. competitiveness via new production technologies; and the increased use of a more sophisticated total cost of ownership (TCO) model—provided by the Reshoring Initiative—to quantify the hidden costs and risks of offshoring. Use the Tools Tools offered by the Reshoring Initiative are well worth getting to know. For example, the organization’s Library shows industries and companies that are reshoring, and could be a potential source of new business for metalformers. Another tool, the TCO Estimator, can help metalformers and their...

Oct 1, 2018

President Trump had threatened to splinter the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement into a bilateral pact with Mexico. By Reuters, NBC News WASHINGTON — The United States and Canada reached a deal on Sunday to salvage NAFTA as a trilateral pact with Mexico, beating a midnight deadline with agreements to substantially boost American access to Canada’s dairy market and protect Canada from possible U.S. auto tariffs, sources with direct knowledge of the talks said. President Donald Trump had threatened to splinter the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement into a bilateral pact with Mexico and tax Canadian vehicle exports to the United States if Ottawa had failed to sign on before a midnight Sunday deadline. But Trump has approved the “framework” deal with Canada, a source familiar with the decision said, just days after he sharply criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his NAFTA negotiating team. Trump blames NAFTA for the loss of American manufacturing jobs and wants major changes to the pact, which underpins $1.2 trillion in annual trade. Markets fear its demise would cause major economic disruption. Negotiators from both sides spent two days talking by phone as they tried to settle a range of difficult issues, such as access to Canada’s closed dairy market and U.S. tariffs. The deal will preserve a trade dispute settlement mechanism that Canada fought hard to maintain to protect its lumber industry and other sectors from U.S. anti-dumping tariffs, Canadian sources said. Late last night, our deadline, we reached a wonderful new Trade Deal with Canada, to be added into the deal already reached with Mexico. The new name will be The United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It is a great deal for all three countries, solves the many…… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2018 ….deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA, greatly opens markets to our Farmers and Manufacturers, reduces Trade Barriers to the U.S. and will bring all three Great Nations together in competition with the rest of the world. The USMCA is a historic transaction! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2018 Congratulations to Mexico and Canada! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2018 But this came...

Jul 30, 2018

By Kenneth Rapoza, Contributor, Forbes Supply chains starting to shift at a faster pace as companies look to avoid tariffs.  China-based manufacturers were already in the process of moving to lower-cost Southeast Asia. Now that trade tariffs have been enacted on at least $50 billion worth of goods, and another $200 billion likely by summer’s end, they are shifting their supply chain. It’s happening. “With recent tariff battles, companies aren’t as eager to have production in China,” says Nathan Resnick, CEO of startup company Sourcify. The business-to-business manufacturing platform has offices in San Diego and Guangzhou. “We run production runs in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Philippines, and Mexico right now. Labor costs are actually more affordable outside of China, so for products like apparel where there is a lot of cut-and-sew labor, most companies are moving out of China anyway,” he says. Sourcify raised $2.5 million through Y Combinator this winter. “I’ve been going back and forth to China for years, and it is getting more expensive. With all these tariffs coming, why not run some of your production runs elsewhere? Companies are saying that the scare of these tariffs has decreased the incentives to manufacture in China.” Sourcify is small, but Kerry Logistics Network, a Hong Kong-listed firm owned by Malaysia’s billionaire Kuok family, is not. The South China Morning Post reported that Kerry shifted part of its production lines from mainland China to its corporate home further south in order to avoid tariffs. “Our clients have been shifting part of their production lines as early as March from China to other Asian countries where they already have manufacturing plants,” William Ma Wing-kai, Kerry’s managing director, was quoted saying in the Hong Kong daily. “This is a reallocation of global production bases,” Ma said. For the last couple of years, China has been moving to a more automated assembly line, pushing lower-cost manufacturing to Vietnam and elsewhere. China is now one of the world’s largest producers of robotics used in manufacturing assembly lines. As the country moves up the value chain, old-school labor like stitch-and-sew apparel manufacturing is leaving the country. Now that the tariffs are in place, with more promised, companies that were...