In the same way Wal-Mart sends the small local retailers packing, China is putting entire countries out of business. They undervalue their currency and undercut the rest of the world. With their hundreds of millions eager and hungry for low paying factory work, they can win at this game.
Wal-Mart is not the problem here. They are just the most noticeable symptom here in the U.S. (and increasingly in other countries) of China's strategy.
China needs to play fair with international trade, or they should face restrictions.
Monday, March 14, 2005
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2 comments:
Global trade is different from open trade: there are not just movement of goods but free movement of capital, services, and people. Businessweek just isn't up to what is happening in what is unregulated international capitalism.
The currency of China is not the problem. And if there were any currency adjustments, that surely should have preceeded this last total opening of textiles, which is in in the flood but nowhere near the highwater mark to come.
Is Walmart the problem: well, yes: that is the voice of American capitalism that provides the very vehicle for the importation of Chinese good: they are the ones that built the market.
One cannot reduce the China problem to currency: their currency in pegged to the dollar, so we have not been able to escape competition from by letting the dollar fall. And very little of the price differential in Chinese goods can be attributed to the currency: 15% is probably the max one could expect, and that is just about nothing.
However, either Walmart is the problem or you (the American shopper) is: Walmart is so very large it SETS the prices, it determines what products will be made and the price it will pay, and with that kind of power, people get hurt.
If you shop and don't care people get hurt and you're supporting Walmart, well, you've got a piece of the action.
Products don't have to actually be made of human parts, skin, hair, etc to be consuming people in their manufacture. No, you can't buy lampshades with human skin, but there's a lot of skin in there anyway.
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