"Ed Huntress" wrote in message . net...
"bg" wrote in message
om...
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
. net...
"bg" wrote in message
om...

So, who's selling to them, and what are they selling? You can look
it
up.

I dont need to, though it is not really difficult to do. They are
selling telecommunications equipment, machine tools, manufacturing
production lines, power generation equipment, assembly line equipment,
quality control equipment, etc. I see it myself. I ask them numerous
times in numerous facilities, "why dont you buy american goods?" their
reply is usually one of two major reasons: snip


This needs some more work before I'd buy into it, bg. Germany's exports
to
China, for example, are just slightly more than half of the US's exports
to
China.

Look up the numbers Ed. China overall is not doing that badly when you
look at the worldwide perspective. This means we are not doing a good
job. (we never have).
According to Eurostat:from jan to April 2003
EU15 increased exports to China 22% over same period 2002
They increased imports by 15% in the same

Total trade imbalance during this period was -16.8 billion euros - a
trifle considering the size of the EU15 and the key is that it is
going down.

The Eurozone has similar numbers

The EU 15 has a trade imbalance with the USA of +20.4 billion Euros
and growing.

What this tells me is that we dont do a good job anywhere. My eyes
dont deceive me. If you've been to china, count how many times you saw
American capital equipment in factories. I almost never do. I think
you can go online now and look at the bids that China puts out
publicly for capital machinery. The machines spec'd are almost always
Japanese or european.

Look at it this way:
How far did blaming the japanese in the 1970's take us? It took us
absolutely nowhere. We adapted to different styles of management and
investment to overcome our own problems. we learned from the Japanese.
It was the best thing that ever happened to us. Otherwise we might
today be looking at the big three owned by Japanese instead of two
American co's and one German.(we lost one, didnt we?). We need to do
the same today. This is what we made of it. It was no one elses fault.
Our own automation and technological advances have increased
productivity to the point of losing jobs bigtime. This also has to be
factored in. Darwin was right about everything. we need to adapt.

Ed Huntress

Chasing down statistics for an online discussion gets real tedious real
fast, bg, and you aren't encouraging me to spend my time on it. First you
say "They expect that surplus to shrink to virtually nothing in 2003 and for
a small deficit in 2004." In fact, China's trade balance is up 40% this year
from Jan-Aug, compared to Jan-Aug last year. Their positive balance actually
is accelerating. Japan is having a fit about it. The EU is alarmed, and,
according to one report, "embarrassed."

You say that they "prefer" Japanese and German production equipment. Of
course they do. We hardly make any. The Japanese cleaned out our machine
tool business in the 1980s. According to AMT, there are only 70 companies in
the US now that could be considered machine-tool manufacturers, and most of
them make custom equipment. When it comes to big-time production equipment,
we're almost out of the business.

I reported on the way they were doing it in the late '70s. In the very early
'80s, I worked for Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and
I saw how they did it. And then, a couple of years later, I was marketing
manager for a Japanese machine tool company, and I watched it being done.
While David Halberstam was writing his book about Japan's ascendance, _The
Reckoning_, a top executive from Toyota took him aside and said, "There's
one thing we don't understand. Why don't you protect yourselves?"

Meantime, Germany and Japan protected their machine tool and automobile
markets to beat hell, with both tariff and non-tariff barriers (Germany
limited Japanese car importers to 10% of their market, with strict quota
enforcement). Look at who is exporting those things now, eh? Can you say,
"protectionism isn't necessarily bad"? I've learned to say it.

Regarding "improving" our manufacturing, the profit in it is going to hell
because the Chinese and other low-wage countries are moving into one market
after another, with no governmental resistance from us and no possibility of
competing with their prices. We now have the most productive and efficient
manufacturing in the world and barely enough profit to keep much of it
alive. What irony, eh?

The basic premise of your first message seemed to be that the EU has a
beneficial balance of trade with China, while we have a horrible one. In
fact, the EU is going to run over US$60 billion in the hole with China this
year and they're climbing out of their skins over it. Watch for some kind of
barriers to appear, somewhere. They've done it before, when the Japanese put
their industry under a lot of pressure. They don't stand for that kind of
pressure.

BTW, it's Japan and the other Asian countries that are the big exporters to
China, not the EU. The entire EU taken together represented only 13.1% of
China's imports last year. China's US imports were 8.8% of the total.

That's the end of my chasing statistics for this thread. It's too much work
just to straighten out issues in this context. You can't really discuss
these things intelligently or accurately without it, but, for that kind of
work, I like to get paid. g

Ed Huntress

Sorry Ed, but the petty cash box is empty. We have had to cut back on
expenses you know.