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...

Jun 12, 2017

By Rob Spiegel, Design News 2016 tipped reshoring jobs into positive territory. Finally, more manufacturing jobs came back into the US than left. During all of 2016, candidate Donald Trump harped on the loss of US manufacturing jobs, scolding companies for moving their production out of the country. As those complaints mounted, jobs actually started to return to the US. The trend accelerated through 2016 and into early 2017. For the first time in decades, more manufacturing jobs returned to the US in 2016 then went offshore, according to the annual data report from the Reshoring Initiative . The report shows that the reshoring trend grew by over 10 percent in 2016, adding 77,000 jobs. That ties the 2014 record and exceeds the rate of offshoring by 27,000 jobs. The results bring the total number of manufacturing jobs brought back from offshore to more than 338,000 since the manufacturing employment low of February 2010. The Trump Factor Reshoring picked up steam all through 2016 and into the first quarter of 2017, according to the Initiative’s founder, Harry Moser. “In the first quarter of 2016, we announced about 10,000 jobs coming back. Then 12,000, then 23,000, and in the fourth quarter, 32,000,” Moser told Design News . “Continuing into the first quarter of 2017, 44,000 jobs were announced as coming back. The first quarter of 2017 was four times as high as the first quarter of 2016.” Given the timing of the jobs returning to the US – growing all through the election year – and given the additional surge in early 2017, Moser sees a connection between Trump’s campaign rhetoric demanding that manufacturing jobs return to the US and the jobs that actually began to return. “It’s clear to us that something significant happened in the fourth quarter of last year and it seems to me that would be Trump,” said Moser. Flipping the Offshoring Trend The Initiative’s report shows a net gain of 27,000 jobs in 2016. The report compares that to the 2000-2003 period when the US lost about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year – net – to offshoring. “The tide has turned. The numbers demonstrate that reshoring is an important contributing factor...

Jan 31, 2017

By Steve Minter, IndustryWeek After decades of offshoring, President Trump is making a concerted effort to return manufacturing to the U.S. Could the world’s most valuable company become the poster child for that reshoring tide? “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China. How does it help us when they make it in China?” After his victory last March in the Super Tuesday primaries, that was the message from candidate Donald J. Trump, who also had criticized dozens of other companies for moving, or planning to move, production offshore from the United States. While Trump criticized Apple a number of times during the campaign, he took a very different tone at a December 14 meeting with a bevy of Silicon Valley giants, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Alphabet’s Larry Page. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” Trump said at the start of the meeting, according to a Bloomberg report. Like it or not, Apple may find itself at the center of a debate concerning the future of American manufacturing. Over the past few decades, many manufacturers have moved jobs from the United States to low-cost countries. In business circles, it has been accepted that this was an inevitable evolution and that the future of the United States lay mainly in the service sector, a transition from low-paying brawn jobs to high-paying brain jobs. While it originally manufactured its computers in the U.S., Apple long ago moved to a system where it designed its products in the United States but used a network of largely Asian manufacturers, in particular Taiwan-based Foxconn, to produce components and assemble its products ranging from the MacBook and the iPad to the ubiquitous iPhone. Both the products and the process have been roaring successes, making Apple the most valuable company in the world. For the past two fiscal years, the Cupertino, Calif., firm has had sales exceeding $200 billion annually and net income of $45 to $53 billion. Moreover, the company is sitting on a cash reserve of more than $237 billion. With a market cap of approximately $640 billion, Apple is much too...