** Breaking News **
Trump's China tariffs aren't crazy.
.....
Unlike the steel and aluminum tariffs, many trade experts and business leaders agree in principle with that assessment of Chinese behavior. Western firms have complained for years that China routinely steals their trade secrets, through outright theft and hacking, and also through domestic rules that require foreign firms to turn over technological know-how as a condition of doing business in China. Keith Alexander, former chief of the National Security Agency, has frequently characterized such intellectual-property theft as “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
IP theft could cost the U.S. economy as much as $600 billion per year globally, with China accounting for most of that, according to the National Bureau of Asian Research, an independent research group headed by Dennis Blair, who was director of national intelligence under President Obama, and Jon Huntsman, Obama’s first ambassador to China. Trump supposedly fumes about the U.S. trade deficit with China, which was $375 billion in 2017. But that’s not a giveaway to China. Americans get something for that $375 billion—namely, cheap goods that would probably cost more if we bought them from someplace else. Intellectual property, or IP, theft is simply lost wealth, which compounds over time as China uses gained knowledge to become a tougher competitor......
** Film at Eleven **