Has Trade War Begun?
Twenty years ago, the Chinese government and Corporate America both concluded they had serious “problems”. China had the world’s largest pool of labour, but relatively few employment opportunities or means of wealth-creation. Corporate America, on the other hand, had concluded that its own domestic labour market had become prohibitively expensive. It wasn’t really an issue of wages. Instead, there were two other factors which influenced these corporate “leaders” to shun American workers – and relocate to jurisdictions where they could slash their labour costs. The most serious burden these companies faced was the exponential increase in the cost of providing medical coverage to their workers, along with a workforce which severely neglected their own health through a number of extremely poor lifestyle choices. The second reason why these corporations had decided that U.S. workers had simply become too expensive was that the grossly-overvalued U.S. dollar made their real take-home pay mu
