Economic View: Let's keep America growing
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/comment/story.jsp?story=493761
By Hamish McRae
22 February 2004
Are the signs of protectionism in the US business as usual or
something more troubling? America has long had a strong protectionist
tendency, which burst out most disastrously in 1933 with the
Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930 that helped turn the US recession into
a worldwide depression. This underlying instinct recurs periodically
in import curbs, most recently over European steel and Chinese bras.
The steel barriers have been lifted and the bra quotas will presumably
not be allowed to sour relations with China too badly. But now the
North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), the deal with Canada and
Mexico that has helped drive the surge in US growth over most of the
past decade, is under attack. John Edwards, the challenger to John
Kerry as Democratic nominee for President, is gaining support for his
anti-trade agreement stance.
Hamish McRae
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