Breaking Waves
- Must read op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday entitled “World Tariff Wars”. They hit the nail on the head. Our politicians in Washington, many unions and a few terminal industries drive much of America’s trade policy – leading to protectionist policies while crying that other countries are “unfair”. Grow up, folks. Brazil and Mexico are giving us what we deserve.
- Commerce has published its annual Top U.S. Export Markets report. This is a great reference containing 2-page summaries on each of the top 50 markets for U.S. goods, plus similar analyses of the impact of America’s 14 current and pending free trade agreements. Good stuff.
- An article caught my eye in the South China Morning Post about electronic trade across the Sea of Japan. Yahoo! Japan and China’s Taobao are negotiating a deal that could potentially boost on-line sales between Japan and China. Yahoo! Japan, of course, is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Softbank, while Taobao, owned by Alibaba, is China’s top Internet shopping portal. This follows a similar tie-up between Baidu, China’s leading search engine, and Rakuten, Japan’s top Internet shopping mall. Not only do these ventures help online sellers with their marketing, but they also ease the problems of physical delivery of the goods. Perhaps the model can be expanded to other markets.
- Selling things that go boom in the night! The law firm of Covington & Burling has issued a paper about prospects for U.S. military sales to India. India’s $30 billion defense budget is a huge increase, reflecting the need to replace outmoded Soviet-era gear. C&B say that India will spend upwards of $100 billion over the next decade. A possible purchase of 145 American howitzers has already been announced, and India plans to buy ten cargo transports from Boeing. Lockheed Martin and Boeing are both competing for an international tender for 126 jet fighters, and further competitions are expected for tanks, more fighters, warships, anything a modern military needs.
- There is a huge competition to build high-speed rail lines in California. The New York Times had an article this week about Chinese attempts to win the bid. California plans to spend $43 billion on high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a number that is attracting bidders from China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy. U.S. suppliers are likely working with all the major bidders, because this project is tied up with stimulus money and associated Buy America rules. Gonna be interesting.
- Sugar prices in the United States are high and rising, contributing to inflation in the grocery store. Part of the reason is that America has long had strict quotas on how much sugar can be imported, quotas designed to protect U.S. farmers from low world prices. That’s no longer the case. World sugar prices are pretty high, too, right now. So, the National Foreign Trade Council is pushing the Obama Administration to increase the quotas (allowing more foreign sugar to come in) to help increase supply in the United States.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 6:52 am and is filed under Business Opportunities, China, India, Japan.
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