Donald Trump Picks Peter Navarro For New Trade Post [Breaking]
President-elect Donald Trump has just announced his pick for White House Trade Council Peter Navarro. Navarro is extremely hawkish on China relating to trade deals, and one of his main aspirations is to renegotiate the current state of trade deals with China. He is a University of California, Irvine, Professor of Economics, and has been very public over the years about the future and the current results of our trade policies with China.
This is a continuation of a shift of policy that essentially boils down to the trade policies being run out of the White House instead of being directed by Congress.
A new office and a new person in that office has been created by President-elect Donald Trump. In this position, Peter Navarro will head the White House Trade Council, and he will help the director of trade and engage directly with all relevant parties before, during, and after the trade renegotiations.
He has been described as a is a visionary economist and holds very controversial views about the practice and place of our trade instruments. He believes that our trade pacts should never be used as instruments of policy and politics, which they are currently used extensively as both carrot and stick.
“The mission of the National Trade Council will be to advise the President on innovative strategies in trade negotiations, coordinate with other agencies to assess U.S. manufacturing capabilities and the defense industrial base, and help match unemployed American workers with new opportunities in the skilled manufacturing sector,” President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team publicly stated.
Trump and Navarro both agree, and both have been publicly critical of the trade policies between China and the United States. They both want the trade policies to become more balanced between the two super powers. They also want to prevent China from manipulating its currency to make their Chinese business exports compete successfully against their American counterparts.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Commerce secretary pick, Wilbur Ross, and Peter Navarro joined together and stated that “four of the most potent unfair trade practices many of our trade partners routinely engage in — currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and the use of both sweatshop labor and pollution havens.” The continued on to say that if “gains are not distributed fairly,” then further renegotiations are mandatory.
They finished by explaining “besides hurting our workers, chronic trade deficits stifle economic growth while we now owe China and other trading partners trillions in U.S. Treasury debt.” They finished by stating “in any negotiation or renegotiation, our guiding principle should be this: Enter into a free trade agreement only if it both increases total trade and reduces our trade deficit. When these two conditions are met, real-world trade will converge with textbook theory, this country will be far more prosperous, and a now shattered faith in the global trading order will be restored.”
Peter Navarro is the author of “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action” which explains the risks of outsourcing all of our labor to China, but also goes into depth on the technical and military to corporate risks of outsourcing high-tech jobs, often that involve patented technology, overseas to China where patent laws are lax at best, and non-existent at worst.
In case you haven’t heard of this new position before, when we say Trump made the position up, that is exactly the truth. This position never existed before Trump took over the White House. As Navarro’s description and history precludes, he will be the director of Trade and Industrial Policy, and his public goals are to shrink the growing trade deficit, expand the economic growth of the United States, and prevent and reverse the exodus of jobs leaving the country for cheaper labor sources.
[Featured Image by Molly Riley / Associated Press]
