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IN TODAY'S GLOBAL MARKETPLACE, Chinese manufacturers can undercut competitors' prices by 30% to 50%, sometimes even more. China has captured more than 70% of the world's market for DVDs and toys; more than half for bikes, shoes, and phones; and more than a third for air conditioners, color TVs, computer monitors, luggage and microwave ovens. It also has dominant market positions in everything from furniture and washing machines to jeans and underwear.

China's biggest bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, raised $19 billion Friday in the world's biggest initial public offering, pricing its IPO at the top end of expectations, thanks to overwhelming demand. The stock sale, the first ever for shares to list in both Hong Kong and Shanghai, surpasses the previous record, a $18.4 billion IPO by Japanese mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo Inc. in 1998. The state-owned bank, called ICBC, priced its Hong Kong offering at 3.07 Hong Kong dollars a share, at the top end of the indicative price range of HK$2.56-HK$3.07 ($0.33-$0.39), Dow Jones Newswires reported,...

Suddenly, China dominates steel industry The Charleston Gazette (W.VA) 07/23/2006 By Author: Paul J. Nyden Today, China has the world's largest steel industry. In fact, the world's most populous nation now produces more steel than the next four largest producers combined: Japan, the United States, Russia and South Korea. Chinese mills make 31 percent of the world's steel. Between 2000 and 2005, Chinese steel production grew by 170 percent, from 126 million metric tons to 349 million metric tons. China's steel exports quadrupled between 1998 and 2005. Steel imports flooding into the United States doubled between 2000 and 2005. The...

China raking it in China's trade surplus hit a monthly high in May. The surplus is on pace to surpass last year's record. May exports jumped 25.1% from a year earlier to $73.11 billion, picking up from a 23.9% increase in April, according to customs figures issued yesterday. Imports rose a more modest 21.7%. The trade surplus, the excess of exports over imports, surged to $13 billion for the month, 44% higher than in May of last year. Low-tech, labor-intensive goods like footwear and toys haven’t been great performers this year, but China’s booming electronics sector and its growing prowess...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (MarketWatch) -- Big as it is, our trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing. Trying to force it down, however, could be. It's been about a quarter of a century since we sold more goods to foreigners than we bought from them. In the intervening months and years, our trade deficit has grown markedly. Fourteen years ago, it took an entire year for our monthly trade deficit to total $70 billion. Now we run up this much red ink in just one month. Not surprisingly, our current account deficit, the shortfall on all trade and investment income...

DETROIT--Since mid-October, General Motors has announced plans to cease production at 12 North American manufacturing facilities and eliminate 30,000 jobs by 2008; trim $1 billion in net material costs in 2006; and, in cooperation with the United Automobile Workers, reduce GM's retiree health-care liabilities by $15 billion, or about 25%, for an annualized expense reduction of $3 billion. The reason for these dramatic actions is no secret: GM has lost a lot of money in 2005, due to rapidly increasing health-care and raw-material costs, lower sales volumes and a weaker sales mix--essentially, we've sold fewer high-profit SUVs and more lower-profit...

China has "eclipsed" the US as a consumer nation China has overtaken the US in the consumption of basic agricultural and industrial goods, a new survey says. China, with its 1.3bn population and booming economy, is now the world's biggest consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel. China is well ahead of the US in the consumption of goods such as television sets, refrigerators and mobile phones. The Washington-based Earth Policy Institute said China was now an emerging economic superpower. However, per capita consumption in China - the world's most populous country - remains far below that of the US....

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton's funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton's admirers, the vice president, now...

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days. The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s. Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention. But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why...

Adam Smith’s Laissez-Fire Package: What Grampaw ForgotSept 27, 2003 The last article I wrote dealing with Adam Smith received an objection from a person by the nickname of “Restorer” which took me to task: [Source] The piece doesn't ever really say that Smithian economics works despite, or rather because of, the fact that its practicioners are mercantilistic in philosophy as far as their own practices go. Restorer has a good point, one explored thoroughly by Walter Wriston, chairman of what used to be Citibank back in the 1980s. According to Wriston, the market will work despite big government because Smith’s...

[278](971){192}     Alexander HamiltonREPORT ON MANUFACTURESDECEMBER 5, 1791[Page numbers from Selected Writings…](Page numbers from Annals of Congress) {Page numbers from Works of Hamilton}  Scanned January, 2001 from primary sources.Contact kleind@union.edu with question, comments, corrections.     Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791  [To the Speaker of the House of Representatives:]     The Secretary of the Treasury in obedience to the order of the House of Representatives, of the 15th day of January 1790, has applied his attention, at as early a period as his other duties would permit, to the subject of Manufactures; and particularly to the means of promoting such...