| This is how a leader should act. 20:43 - May 31 with 16367 views | peenemunde |
Well done president Trump, protecting the American steel industry.
Doing what he said he’d do, during election campaign.
A man of his word........  |  | | |  |
| This is how a leader should act. on 16:10 - Jun 8 with 1331 views | Lohengrin |
So it is the safe and sensible thing to exclude Russia from international discourse based on a league table in the Statistics Times supplied by the press office of the IMF?
Yeah! you’ve got me all ends up there. I’m sold. 
*NB: That last was a western European attempt at being ironic, as distinct from that you discerned the works of Marx to be freighted with on the other thread...  |  |
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| This is how a leader should act. on 16:29 - Jun 8 with 1312 views | Shaky |
| This is how a leader should act. on 16:10 - Jun 8 by Lohengrin |
So it is the safe and sensible thing to exclude Russia from international discourse based on a league table in the Statistics Times supplied by the press office of the IMF?
Yeah! you’ve got me all ends up there. I’m sold.
*NB: That last was a western European attempt at being ironic, as distinct from that you discerned the works of Marx to be freighted with on the other thread... |
Russia is a full member of the IMF
https://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/memdate.htm
But if you want to flaunt your gullibility and susceptibility to crackpot conspiracy theories, please be my guest. |  |
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| This is how a leader should act. on 16:33 - Jun 8 with 1304 views | Shaky |
Meanwhile Putin continues to play both sides against the middle:
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Putin tells Europe on U.S. trade threat - 'I told you so'
By Andrew Osborn, Polina Nikolskaya
Reuters, World NewsJune 7, 2018 / 1:11 AM / Updated 12 hours ago
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he had warned European countries years ago about the risk of the United States imposing its rules on others, and that they were now paying the price for ignoring him.
Speaking during a live television phone-in with the Russian people that lasted over four hours, Putin likened the tariffs that Washington imposed last week on steel and aluminium imports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union to economic sanctions.
“It appears our partners thought that this would never affect them, this counterproductive politics of restrictions and sanctions. But now we are seeing that this is happening.”
The president said he had warned in a speech in Munich in 2007 about a growing U.S. sense of exceptionalism and the risk of it imposing its own rules on other countries.
“That is exactly what is happening now. Nobody wanted to listen, and nobody did anything to stop this from developing. Well, there you go, you’ve been hit. Dinner is served ... please sit down and eat.”
Putin also accused the United States of upsetting the strategic nuclear balance, and said nobody should take any hasty steps: “The understanding that a third world war could be the end of civilisation should restrain us.”
He put neighbouring Ukraine on notice that if it tried to make any military moves against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine while Russia hosted the soccer World Cup this summer, Ukraine would suffer:
“I hope that there won’t be any provocations, but if it happens I think it would have very serious consequences for Ukrainian statehood in general.”
Full story: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-putin/putin-on-living-standards-drive-t
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| This is how a leader should act. on 16:44 - Jun 8 with 1292 views | Lohengrin |
When addressing the problem of Russia you have to factor in two considerations: her formidable arsenal and her willingness to deploy it. Explain to me how my point about it being by far the wisest course to include her in bodies like the G7, to demonstrate the practical benefits of cooperation equates to a conspiracy theory?
In between your interminable copy and paste marathons you seem to be getting increasingly erratic Shaky, old chap. 
Off to work now. Ta ra  | |
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| This is how a leader should act. on 09:34 - Jun 9 with 1201 views | Shaky |
Can he really be this stupid?
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Economists reject Trump claims of unfair trade system
By Delphine Strauss in London
Financial Times, 8 June 2018
Donald Trump raged against his G7 allies this week, accusing them of charging the US “massive” tariffs and erecting barriers to keep American farmers out.
Economists, however, have heaped scorn on many of the US president’s claims, saying they were a distortion of reality that betrayed a lack of understanding of the issues or of what mattered for the US economy.
First, take Mr Trump’s claim, directed mainly at the EU and Canada, that “we charge a country ZERO to sell their goods, and they charge us 25, 50 or even 100 per cent”.
US tariffs are indeed slightly lower than those of the EU and Canada but the difference is marginal. WTO statistics show that the EU’s average trade-weighted tariff was 3 per cent in 2015, the latest year for which this figure was available. Canada’s average trade-weighted tariff was 3.1 per cent, compared with 2.4 per cent for the US.
The difference is even smaller when it comes to the tariffs that US exporters actually paid in 2015 – a weighted average of 1.4 per cent on non-agricultural goods sold in the EU, and 2.1 per cent on non-agricultural exports to Canada. EU exporters to the US paid an average weighted tariff of 1.6 per cent; Canadian exporters 1.3 per cent.
Paul Krugman, the US economist and Nobel laureate, said Mr Trump appeared to be mistaking the EU’s application of value-added-tax (charged on imported and domestically produced goods equally) for a tariff, showing that he was “making trade policy with zero understanding of the most basic facts and concepts”.
Adam Posen, president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank, said: “Right now, the level of tariffs on trade in goods around the world is lower than it has been for 150 years . . . and that is due to the path of US policy over the last 75 years.”
Moreover, he added, each time the US had reached a so-called “bad deal” in trade negotiations, the other countries involved had lowered their tariffs and barriers more than the US.
These average tariffs are not the whole story, of course. One cause of contention is the EU’s 10 per cent tariff on car imports, which is far higher than the 2.5 per cent imposed by the US. But the US has much bigger barriers when it comes to pick-up trucks.
“That is the whole point of those deals . . . it depends on political preferences,” said Guntram Wolff, director of Bruegel, the Brussels-based think-tank.
Agricultural tariffs are in general higher, and in some cases punitive.
Mr Trump has called attention to Canada’s high tariffs on dairy imports. Canada’s so-called “supply management” policy, which governs dairy and poultry production, has long drawn criticism from Europe and Australia as well as the US – while driving up prices for Canadian consumers.
US farmers were unhappy when the Canadian government closed a loophole that previously allowed US processors to export cheap, ultra-filtered milk. US-Canadian disputes over the lumber industry date back even further – to George Washington’s presidency.
But the US sugar industry enjoys similar protection. David Henig, a trade expert at the European Centre for International Political Economy, said the main reason trade deals disadvantaged the US was because Washington’s focus was so often on agriculture, rather than on new growth sectors.
“He [Mr Trump] is going to make them worse, because he’s going to focus even more on old industries,” said Mr Henig. Mr Posen added: “Every country has its preferred handouts to farmers: it’s unfortunate but it’s hardly the point.”
Mr Posen said the one area where Mr Trump had “a bit of a point” was in non-tariff barriers. The US had in the past been relatively transparent, while some of its trade partners had used regulation to shelter their own producers.
Yet while this may be true at federal level, US states impose many more barriers. There is also a big exception, in the form of the “Buy American” laws that shut foreign companies out of US government procurement.
Mr Trump’s biggest gripe, of course, is the sheer size of the US trade deficit. But Gabriel Felbermayr, a trade expert at Germany’s IFO Institute, noted that Mr Trump “talks about the US deficit in goods, but forgets to mention that the US is running a massive surplus against the EU in services and corporate profits”.
Mr Wolff said Mr Trump’s fundamental mistake was to assume that the US trade deficit was a function of tariffs. “The main driver of the trade balance is domestic behaviour on savings and investment”, he said.He added that the president’s recent tax cuts gave “a huge stimulus to the consumer – that will increase it”.
https://www.ft.com/content/2edf26f8-6b28-11e8-b6eb-4acfcfb08c11 | |
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