China-based manufacturers were already in the process of moving to lower-cost Southeast Asia. Now that trade tariffs have been enacted on at least $50 billion worth of goods, and another $200 billion likely by summer’s end, they are shifting their supply chain. It’s happening.

“With recent tariff battles, companies aren’t as eager to have production in China,” says Nathan Resnick, CEO of startup company Sourcify. The business-to-business manufacturing platform has offices in San Diego and Guangzhou. “We run production runs in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Philippines and Mexico right now. Labor costs are actually more affordable outside of China, so for products like apparel where there is a lot of cut-and-sew labor, most companies are moving out of China anyway,” he says. Sourcify raised $2.5 million through Y Combinator this winter. “I’ve been going back and forth to China for years, and it is getting more expensive. With all these tariffs coming, why not run some of your production runs elsewhere? Companies are saying that the scare of these tariffs has decreased the incentives to manufacture in China.”

Sourcify is small, but Kerry Logistics Network, a Hong Kong-listed firm owned by Malaysia’s billionaire Kuok family, is not. The South China Morning Post reported that Kerry shifted part of its production lines from mainland China to its corporate home further south in order to avoid tariffs.

“Our clients have been shifting part of their production lines as early as March from China to other Asian countries where they already have manufacturing plants,” William Ma Wing-kai, Kerry's managing director, was quoted saying in the Hong Kong daily. “This is a reallocation of global production bases,” Ma said.

For the last couple of years, China has been moving to a more automated assembly line, pushing lower-cost manufacturing to Vietnam and elsewhere. China is now one of the world’s largest producers of robotics used in manufacturing assembly lines. As the country moves up the value chain, old-school labor like stitch-and-sew apparel manufacturing is leaving the country.

Now that the tariffs are in place, with more promised, companies that were considering relocating are doing so sooner than planned.

In recent interviews with the British press, Goldman Sachs and Trump administration alum Steve Bannon said that the nationalist policies of the new White House ultimately seek to remap global supply chains in favor of American manufacturing.

China has been reacting to Trump’s measures. Each tariff imposed on them has been met in kind by tariffs against American imports. Trump has proposed $200 billion more, but Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has not retaliated with similar numbers.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said Thursday that the country would abide by World Trade Organization rules and would like to see them fixed for the better of globalization.

“China is supportive of WTO reform and hopes the reform will address the concerns of most members and reflect their needs,” Ministry of Commerce spokesperson Gao Feng said at a press conference last week. “It’s better to avoid a trade war.”

China has responded to the current trade war by providing new fiscal stimulus, including tax breaks.

Chinese premier Li Keqiang came out of nowhere last week, saying that Beijing would do everything possible to prop up the domestic economy in light of a trade war. Mainland equities are down over 20% since their highs reached in mid-January. Investors are expecting a looser monetary policy from the central bank. But foreign investors also face a weaker Chinese currency, meaning forex risks will eat up gains in the A-shares.

GDP growth remained largely solid at 6.8% in the first half, with retail sales and property investment holding steady. Now that the trade dispute is heating up, things are seen taking a turn for the worse. A slight weakening was spotted in June industrial output and investment, and worries have been on the rise that escalating trade tensions could bite into the economy in a couple of months. A full scale trade war, wherein Trump’s high-water mark of $500 billion in tariffs is reached, is forecast to take at least a half-percent off of Chinese GDP, based on research by Matthews Asia, a San Francisco-based mutual fund company.

Tariffs are hurting China.

The country is expanding imports steadily with some items heavily reliant on the U.S. market. For instance, China tariffs on soybeans are 25%. Chinese traders are now forced to either pay 25% more for American beans or go to Brazil and pay just about the same price even without the tariff. Brazil is always more expensive than the U.S.

In the next five years, imports are expected to hit $8 trillion, a potential boon to U.S. companies ... providing China lets them in.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2018/07/30/trade-war-casualties-factories-shifting-out-of-china/

https://www.ccn.com/venezuelan-launches-adopt-a-family-movement-after-buying-400-kg-of-food-with-crypto/

Here one  Redditor recently decided to use donations received in NANO to buy over 400 kg of food for his friends and family in the country, which is facing one of the deepest economic recessions yet. He’s now launching a movement to support others.

His efforts have started showing results.

My question is whether New era of co operation among people has started.? 

Should the U.S. stop importing from China?

If Bitcoins aren't tied to a conventional currency, how did they get so valuable?

Do you think crypto companies are soon going to replace traditional sponsors like fiat casinos and sportsbooks or airline companies, car manufacturers etc.?

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis. It has a ‘good jobs’ crisis – where too much employment is insecure, and poorly paid

The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8%. The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.

But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits. The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis. It has a good jobs crisis.

When Republicans delivered their $1.5tn tax cut last December they predicted a big wage boost for American workers. Forget it. Wages actually dropped in the second quarter of this year.

Not even the current low rate of unemployment is forcing employers to raise wages. Contrast this with the late 1990s, the last time unemployment dipped close to where it is today, when the portion of national income going into wages was 3% points higher than it is today.

What’s going on? Simply put, the vast majority of American workers have lost just about all their bargaining power. The erosion of that bargaining power is one of the biggest economic stories of the past four decades, yet it’s less about supply and demand than about institutions and politics.

Two fundamental forces have changed the structure of the US economy, directly altering the balance of power between business and labor. The first is the increasing difficulty for workers of joining together in trade unions. The second is the growing ease by which corporations can join together in oligopolies or to form monopolies.

By the mid-1950s more than a third of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. In subsequent decades public employees became organized, too. Employers were required by law not just to permit unions but to negotiate in good faith with them. This gave workers significant power to demand better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. (Agreements in unionized industries set the benchmarks for the non-unionized).

Yet starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought against unions. Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire the nation’s air-traffic controllers, who went on an illegal strike, signaled to private-sector employers that fighting unions was legitimate. A wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to do whatever was necessary to maximize shareholder returns. Together, they ushered in an era of union-busting.

Employers have been firing workers who attempt to organize, threatening to relocate to more “business friendly” states if companies unionize, mounting campaigns against union votes, and summoning replacement workers when unionized workers strike. Employer groups have lobbied states to enact more so-called “right-to-work” laws that bar unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. A recent supreme court opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees has extended the principle of “right-to-work” to public employees.

Today, fewer than 7% of private-sector workers are unionized, and public-employee unions are in grave jeopardy, not least because of the supreme court ruling. The declining share of total US income going to the middle since the late 1960s – defined as 50% above and 50% below the median – correlates directly with that decline in unionization. (See chart below).



Perhaps even more significantly, the share of total income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans over the last century is almost exactly inversely related to the share of the nation’s workers who are unionized. (See chart below). When it comes to dividing up the pie, most American workers today have little or no say. The pie is growing but they’re getting only the crumbs.



Over the same period time, antitrust enforcement has gone into remission. The US government has essentially given a green light to companies seeking to gain monopoly power over digital platforms and networks (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook); wanting to merge into giant oligopolies (pharmaceuticals, health insurers, airlines, seed producers, food processors, military contractors, Wall Street banks, internet service providers); or intent on creating local monopolies (food distributors, waste disposal companies, hospitals).

This means workers are spending more on such goods and services than they would were these markets more competitive. It’s exactly as if their paychecks were cut. Concentrated economic power has also given corporations more ability to hold down wages, because workers have less choice of whom to work for. And it has let companies impose on workers provisions that further weaken their bargaining power, such as anti-poaching and mandatory arbitration agreements.

This great shift in bargaining power, from workers to corporations, has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since the second world war. In recent years, most of those profits have gone into higher executive pay and higher share prices rather than into new investment or worker pay. Add to this the fact that the richest 10% of Americans own about 80% of all shares of stock (the top 1% owns about 40%), and you get a broader picture of how and why inequality has widened so dramatically.

Another consequence: corporations and wealthy individuals have had more money to pour into political campaigns and lobbying, while labor unions have had far less. In 1978, for example, congressional campaign contributions by labor Political Action Committees were on par with corporate PAC contributions. But since 1980, corporate PAC giving has grown at a much faster clip, and today the gulf is huge.

It is no coincidence that all three branches of the federal government, as well as most state governments, have become more “business-friendly” and less “worker-friendly” than at any time since the 1920s. As I’ve noted, Congress recently slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Meanwhile, John Roberts’ supreme court has more often sided with business interests in cases involving labor, the environment, or consumers than has any supreme court since the mid-1930s. Over the past year it not only ruled against public employee unions but also decided that workers cannot join together in class action suits when their employment contract calls for mandatory arbitration. The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, and is now about where it was in 1950 when adjusted for inflation. Trump’s labor department is busily repealing many rules and regulations designed to protect workers.

The combination of high corporate profits and growing corporate political power has created a vicious cycle: higher profits have generated more political influence, which has altered the rules of the game through legislative, congressional, and judicial action – enabling corporations to extract even more profit. The biggest losers, from whom most profits have been extracted, have been average workers.

America’s shift from farm to factory was accompanied by decades of bloody labor conflict.

The shift from factory to office and other sedentary jobs created other social upheaval. The more recent shift in bargaining power from workers to large corporations – and consequentially, the dramatic widening of inequalities of income, wealth, and political power – has had a more unfortunate and, I fear, more lasting consequence: an angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia.

Robert Reich is chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and was secretary of labour in the Clinton administration. His latest book, The Common Good, was published earlier this year

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-workers-paycheck-robert-reich

The U.S. economy accelerated to a 4.1 percent pace of growth in the second quarter, the fastest since 2014, letting President Donald Trump claim a win for his policies even though expansion is projected to cool.

The annualized rate of gains in gross domestic product was just shy of the 4.2 percent median forecast in a Bloomberg survey. It followed first-quarter growth of 2.2 percent that was revised from 2 percent, the Commerce Department reported Friday. Consumer spending grew 4 percent, more than estimated, while nonresidential business investment climbed at a 7.3 percent clip.

Trump seized the chance to declare his policies, including the biggest tax overhaul since the Reagan era, a success, calling the data “amazing” and “very sustainable.” The likelihood is nevertheless that the pace of expansion will slow as the effects of tax cuts fades, companies pull back in the face of foreign tariffs or strong dollar and the Federal Reserve raises interest rates further.

“The economy is doing quite well,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “It’ll be hard to repeat this performance on a sustained basis.”

Illustrating the volatility of some elements of GDP, net exports contributed 1.06 percentage point to the pace of growth, the most since 2013, partly on a surge in soybean shipments ahead of retaliatory tariffs. Inventories subtracted 1 point, the most since 2014, Commerce said, citing soybean stocks as well as those of drugs and sundries and petroleum and related products.

Fed policy makers are expected to continue their gradual pace of interest-rate hikes aimed at keeping the economy from overheating, without moving so fast that they could choke off growth. The dollar and yields on 10-year Treasuries declined after the report, which also showed inflation excluding food and energy was lower than estimated.

‘Great Numbers’
Trump, speaking Friday at the White House, celebrated the report and said the economy is on track to reach an annual growth rate of more than 3 percent. “As the trade deals come in one by one, we’re going to go a lot higher than these numbers, and these are great numbers,” the president said.

Economists’ forecasts for second-quarter GDP, the value of all goods and services produced in the nation, ranged from 3 percent to 5 percent. The GDP estimate is the first of three for the quarter, with the other releases scheduled for August and September when more information becomes available.

With the Friday data, the Commerce Department also released comprehensive GDP revisions going back decades. They showed a higher household-saving rate than previously reported, as well as faster growth in the first quarter of recent years, though the overall narrative of the economy’s performance over the last decade wasn’t much different.

The revisions also showed the economy surpassed $20 trillion in nominal dollars in the first quarter.

Even with the relatively strong pace of growth last quarter, most economists expect expansion to settle back to near its long-run rate, and some have flagged the risk of a recession in two years. While polls and historical trends suggest Democrats are primed for significant gains in November’s midterm elections, voters give Trump high marks for the economy.

GDP Goal
Compared with a year earlier, second-quarter GDP rose 2.8 percent, just shy of the 3 percent mark, which was last reached in 2015. The Trump administration’s official goal is for sustained GDP growth of 3 percent, which would well exceed the average 2.2 percent pace during this expansion and the Fed’s longer-run expectation of 1.8 percent.

One measure that economists look at for a better sense of underlying demand showed strength. Final sales to private domestic purchasers -- which exclude trade, inventories and government outlays -- grew at a 4.3 percent pace, the second- fastest since 2014.

The pace of expansion in consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy, exceeded projections for 3 percent and contributed 2.69 percentage points to growth. Purchases of new autos were a major factor, along with spending on health care, housing and utilities and food services and accommodations. That followed a downwardly revised 0.5 percent pace of consumption growth in the prior three months.

In addition to lower taxes, consumers’ purchasing power is benefiting from steady hiring, an unemployment rate that’s near the lowest since 1969, improving finances, relatively low borrowing costs and contained inflation.

Business Investment
The growth in nonresidential business investment contributed almost 1 percentage point to growth though the 7.3 percent pace was slower than the first quarter’s 11.5 percent. Spending on structures advanced 13.3 percent following a 13.9 percent gain in the prior period, while equipment investment cooled to 3.9 percent and intellectual property spending slowed to 8.2 percent.

Housing remained a weak spot in the economy amid signs that the sector is poised for its broadest slowdown in years. Residential investment contracted at a 1.1 percent rate, the fourth decline in five quarters. The drag on overall growth, though, was negligible.

The contribution from net exports reflected a 9.3 percent gain in shipments abroad and a 0.5 percent increase in imports. In addition to soybeans, exports were boosted by petroleum and related products. “Producers may have front-loaded some goods for exports ahead of the tariffs,” JPMorgan’s Feroli said.

Government spending increased at a 2.1 percent rate, adding 0.37 percentage point to growth. Federal outlays rose 3.5 percent, the second-fastest rate since 2014, boosted by defense spending. State and local outlays advanced 1.4 percent.

Spending Power
The data showed consumers’ wallets grew at a slower pace. After- tax incomes adjusted for inflation increased at a 2.6 percent annual pace, after 4.4 percent in the prior quarter. The saving rate fell to 6.8 percent from 7.2 percent, which was revised from 3.3 percent as part of the comprehensive update.

First-quarter gross domestic income, adjusted for inflation, was revised to a 3.9 percent gain from a previously reported 3.6 percent.

Price data in the report indicated that inflation was in line with the Fed’s goal. Excluding food and energy, the central bank’s preferred price index rose at a 2 percent annualized rate last quarter, following 2.2 percent in the first three months of the year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-27/u-s-gdp-growth-hits-4-1-fastest-since-2014-in-win-for-trump

Most human economic activities are influenced by the need for money. But why can anyone not become rich?. What are the reasons why others work hard yet they are still poor? Why can't we print enough money for everyone? Questions like this do appear but there are reasons the answers are opposite.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As trade tensions escalate between Washington and Beijing, the U.S. Senate quietly passed legislation on Thursday that would lower trade barriers on hundreds of items made in China.

With no debate, the Senate unanimously passed a bill that would cut or eliminate tariffs on toasters, chemicals and roughly 1,660 other items made outside the United States.

Nearly half of those items are produced in China, according to a Reuters analysis of government records.

The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, are increasingly at loggerheads over trade.

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced a series of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports in a bid to halt a Chinese surge in high-technology industries that threatens to displace U.S. dominance. China has retaliated with its own duties on imports from the United States.

The White House has not publicly taken a position on the so-called miscellaneous tariff bill, which has now passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives unanimously. The two chambers need to resolve minor differences before they can send the legislation to Trump to sign into law.

Supporters of the bill have said it would boost the economy by getting rid of tariffs set up to protect industries that no longer exist in the United States. The National Association of Manufacturers has said U.S. businesses pay $1 million a day on such import duties.

“It makes no sense because it is a direct and punishing tax on making things in America and for creating jobs in America,” the trade group’s president, Jay Timmons, said in a prepared statement celebrating the bill’s passage.

Among the beneficiaries are companies that have moved production offshore.

Hamilton Beach Brands Holding Co (HBB.N), for example, would pay reduced tariffs on Chinese-made toaster ovens, steam irons and other household appliances it used to make domestically.

Some domestic manufacturers have complained the bill would undercut their business by making it easier for rivals to bring in cheap foreign goods. They said the bill punished smaller firms that lack the ability to defend their interests in Washington.

The version of the bill that passed the House in January included 145 items that are made domestically, according to a Reuters analysis.

“There’s no reason to block opportunity U.S. manufacturers might have for rebuilding our manufacturing base,” Michael Korchmar, the head of a family-owned travel goods company in Florida, said in a phone interview earlier this month.

Korchmar earlier this year planned to hire up to 30 workers in his Naples, Florida, factory, but he put those plans on hold after being told by Reuters that the bill would lower tariffs on an insulated food bag that he planned to produce.

Korchmar said he may yet decide to expand production, because Democratic Senator Bill Nelson removed that item from the bill after Reuters wrote about it in March.

“We’ve got a good shot - we’ve lost a good bit of time and we have to re-evaluate the market,” Korchmar said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-trade/u-s-senate-quietly-votes-to-cut-tariffs-on-hundreds-of-chinese-goods-idUSKBN1KG35R

Maybe you guys can give me some feedbacks or suggestions. If I get enough input, I will try to start running a serious website.