Krugman: ... why isn’t 2008- playing like 1929- ? Why no surge in protectionism this time?

[pampango]

The Protectionist Non-Surge

So why, exactly, aren’t we seeing more protection? Why aren’t politicians — especially conservative politicians like those responsible for Smoot-Hawley — looking at the situation and saying, hmm, a tariff won’t increase the deficit, it won’t involve debasing the currency, but it could clearly help create jobs?

One answer might be the “Smoot-Hawley caused the Depression” thing; this isn’t true at all, but it might be serving the purpose of a noble lie.

Or maybe it’s the structure of trade agreements. The countries that arguably could really, really use some protection right now are inside the European Union, so no go. Countries outside still know that any protection they impose will lead to big problems at the WTO; the United States has to know that a protectionist response would break up the whole world trading system we’ve spent almost 80 years building.

So here’s a thought: maybe the secret of our protectionist non-surge isn’t macroeconomics; it’s institutions.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/the-protectionist-non-surge/

[msongs]

1. how trade agreements really work to benefit corporations, not people or countries...

corporation A owns stores in the USA
it owns an airline
it owns farms in a far away country.

so it buys from own foreign farms
ships it by its own airline
sells it in store it owns
keeps all the money and the cost/price is irrelevant.

skips all that annoying stuff like buying locally, processing locally, paying NON-members of the corporation