[video=youtube;gN21PEIv4Vo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpag e&v=gN21PEIv4Vo[/video] Also see the thread and the comments in the United States section of the forum:
The big question is whether such an an agreement with the USA would also essentially mean opening Europe up to all America's other trading partners. If Chinese products can be imported into the USA, there would then be nothing stopping them from being imported into Europe. Free trade, and all the resulting trade imbalances that accompany it, has completely dismantled America's industrial base and led to unemployment problems and displaced decent paid former factory workers into low paying jobs in the service sector. If it was not for all the other trade agreements the USA had signed, I would have nothing against just direct trade between the USA and Europe, so long as they have similar standards of living. I think the USA should start putting up tariffs with all those other third world countries, and open up trade with europe instead. Hopefully consumers would start getting higher quality products, instead of cheap ones that are not even worth it because they just break after a short period of time.
The US has lost more as 10m manufacturing jobs to China since 2001, would it not be commodities ' made in China'? I support the idea of Free Trade Union but without a reexport from cunningly China.
Then you clearly don;t understand the nature of such agreements. If the EU and the USA were to enter into a free trade agreement than we would have to harmonize our tariffs to areas outside the agreement. SO Tariffs on Chinese goos would be the same wther it was landed in San Diego, Marseilles or Rotterdam. Obviously free trade leads to the loss of jobs in areas where a country is an inefficient producer but it gains in areas where the country is more effecient and leads to lower prices for everyone
It is nice to see these attemts to revive Frankenstein, but they are useless I fear. Life level is too high and production base is too small. Europe and USA can't compete with Asia anymore. They have much more "space" to grow economically and I can't see anything capable of turning this situation visa verse.
