Robert E. Scott

The U.S. Export-Import Bank Charter expires on May 31, and it could reach its lending limit of $100 billion by May 1, forcing it to temporarily stop making new loans. The Obama administration is seeking a four-year renewal of the bank's charter, and wants to raise its lending...

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, which helps finance the export of U.S. goods and services that support jobs here at home, is bumping up against its borrowing capacity, which will expire on May 31 unless renewed by Congress. The Bank is one of the few federal institutions that exist to make...

In a recent report, I showed that full revaluation of the yuan and other undervalued Asian currencies would improve the U.S. current account balance by up to $190.5 billion, increasing U.S. GDP by as much as $285.7 billion, adding up to 2.25 million U.S. jobs and reducing the...

An April 7 column in the New York Times Economix blog highlighted the rapid growth of U.S. exports to China, which look impressive in isolation. But this is a biased and one-sided view -- exports have been overwhelmed by the growth of U.S. imports from China and the...

President Obama talked about doubling exports in the State of the Union Address last night as a strategy to create jobs. It's a great sound bite, but woefully incomplete economics. While exports support American jobs, imports displace them; when imports grow faster than exports, our trade...

Hearings held last week by the House Ways and Means and Senate Banking Committees marked a turning point in Congressional debate on China's currency manipulation policies. There was widespread support for getting tough with China from members of both houses, and only token opposition from a...

Larry Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, returned empty handed from meetings this week with Chinese President Hu Jintao and other senior government officials. Although China announced in June that it would allow its currency to fluctuate, the yuan has gained less than one half of one percent since...

An op-ed published in The New York Times last week (August 23) claimed that revaluation of the Chinese yuan would "make barely a dent in America's trade deficit." This ludicrous assertion flies in the face of basic economic theory and our own economic history. The U.S....

Growing trade deficits with China eliminated or displaced 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2008. China's manipulation of its currency, the Renminbi (RMB), is responsible for at least 1 million of these displaced jobs. The best estimates show that the RMB (or yuan) is undervalued by at...

Some bloggers have suggested that manufacturing is doing well, just because output has grown for the past few months. One sets up a straw man in a piece title "No, Virginia, U.S. Manufacturing isn't dead," but no serious economist claims that manufacturing is dead. Manufacturing employed 11.5 million...