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Yellen declares end to Trump’s global retreat, eyes tax deal

InternationalApr 06. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Saleha Mohsin, Christopher Condon

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outlined the case for a harmonized corporate tax rate across the world’s major economies, part of an effort to restore global leadership and credibility with U.S. allies following the unilateralist approach of the Trump era.

In her first major speech on international economic policy, Yellen marked an American return to the “global stage.” She singled out China as she said that the US. needs a “strong presence in global markets” to level the playing field.

“America first must never mean America alone,” she said in remarks to a conference Monday ahead of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. “A lack of global leadership and engagement makes our institutions and economy vulnerable.”

Yellen criticized the strategy of President Donald Trump’s administration, decrying four years when the U.S. “isolated ourselves and retreated from the international order that we created.”

The new multilateral approach begins with the U.S. taking a leading role in working with Group of 20 nations to find an appropriate minimum corporate tax. Yellen wants to halt what she described as an international “race to the bottom” by countries competing to lure corporations with lower taxes.

– – –

The U.S. is involved in talks led by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with about 140 countries to develop a global agreement on minimum levies, but participants haven’t yet reached a deal.

Yellen is participating in her first round of meetings as Treasury secretary during the spring IMF and World Bank meetings, being held virtually this year.

During the week, she will meet with finance ministers to discuss climate change, finalize a boost to IMF resources to help poor nations cope with covid-19, President Joe Biden’s “Made in America tax Plan,” and attend bilateral meetings, including with her Canadian counterpart.

“Competitiveness is about more than how U.S.-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger-and-acquisition bids,” Yellen said in her remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “It is about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government.”

– – –

The Treasury chief also called on other major economies “to continue a strong fiscal effort and avoid withdrawing support too early, to promote a strong recovery and help avoid the emergence of global imbalances.”

She highlighted the Biden administration’s plans for sustained economic support, with a $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan following the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief bill signed last month. She said 130 million relief payments have now been sent to individuals and families.

Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump’s newly sworn-in Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, shocked American allies during the administration’s first international meeting with an approach so unilateral that it extended to outright disengagement.

Mnuchin barely spoke a word during closed-door sessions in his first meetings with Group of 20 finance ministers in March 2017, held in Germany. He spoke up during a plenary session just once — to urge the group to set aside any vows to avoid protectionism.

– – –

Yellen’s speech demonstrates a major about-face. “Credibility abroad begins with credibility at home,” she said Monday.

Yellen also declared that the U.S. would lead a charge against global poverty, beginning with efforts to stamp out Covid-19 in developing countries and helping their economies recover from it. And she again cast the goal as one that aligned not only with U.S. values, but its interests, as well.

Yellen said failure to help poorer countries get past the pandemic “would be a profound economic tragedy.””What’s less obvious — but equally true — is that this divergence would also be a problem for America,” she added. “With few exceptions, stable and prosperous economies tend to be less of a security threat to the United States.”

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Yellen warns that slow vaccine rollout in poor countries poses threat to U.S., global economies

InternationalApr 06. 2021

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday called for speeding up the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine in poorer nations, arguing the U.S. and global economies are threatened by the impact of covid-19 on the developing world.

While the United States and other rich countries are hoping for a return to normalcy as soon as this fall, many parts of the developing world are not on pace to have widespread vaccination of their populations until 2023 or 2024. Those countries have largely suffered more devastating economic impacts from covid, in part because they do not have the fiscal capacity to authorize the levels of emergency spending approved in the United States.

In prepared remarks Monday to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ahead of meetings this week of international finance officials, Yellen called on richer countries to step up both economic and public health assistance to poorer nations reeling from covid. She noted as many as 150 million people across the world risk falling into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis.

“This would be a profound economic tragedy for those countries, one we should care about. But, that’s obvious. What’s less obvious – but equally true – is that this divergence would also be a problem for America,” Yellen said. “Our first task must clearly be stopping the virus by ensuring that vaccinations, testing and therapeutics are available as widely as possible.”

Still, Yellen’s calls for a forceful global effort face significant head winds. The Biden administration has so far resisted pressure to change intellectual property rules in a way that would allow more countries to produce coronavirus vaccines. Democratic members of Congress and some global health experts have warned that refusing to do so could make it harder to vaccinate billions of people in poorer countries such as Africa and parts of South America and Asia.

Meanwhile, Republican opposition has intensified in recent weeks to several of Yellen’s global initiatives. GOP lawmakers have in particular criticized Yellen’s push for a new international minimum tax, as well as her support for foreign emergency aid through the International Monetary Fund.

Yellen’s remarks come at a pivotal juncture for her ambitious international agenda. In a reversal from the decision of the Trump administration, the Treasury Department under Yellen will this month authorize a new allocation of an emergency form of aid to developing nations known as “Special Drawing Rights.”

This form of international aid, which does not need congressional approval, would allocate a special currency reserve through the IMF to dozens of countries across the globe. That special currency could then be traded to the United States in exchange for dollars, which would help distressed foreign countries shore up their financial reserves.

The move has sparked a backlash on Capitol Hill, where Sens. Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., and John Kennedy, R-La., criticized the measure as “inappropriate, ineffective, and a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars” that would benefit both countries who do not need help and foreign adversaries such as China and Iran. The Treasury Department responded that the United States would retain the right not to purchase SDRs from foreign countries, such as those being sanctioned by the U.S. The department also said there would be no budget cost to the United States from the initial allocation of SDRs.

On top of these efforts, Yellen is also pushing for an agreement through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on a new global minimum tax. That effort aims to put a floor on taxes internationally to stop corporations from playing nations off each other. Treasury officials have eyed an agreement on international taxes as early as this summer. The Biden administration has cited the effort as central to its proposed international tax hikes, which form a key element of how the White House plans to pay for its $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure proposal.

The Biden administration’s global tax push has also been extensively criticized by Republicans, who worry the United States will allow European countries to tax profitable American tech companies with no significant domestic benefit. “My big concern is that – as part of their desire to be on a ‘let’s be friends’ parade – the Biden administration will give away too much,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, previously said.

Yellen cited the need for international action on an additional range of issues, including climate change, a digital divide that has exacerbated global inequality, and the danger posed by cybersecurity attacks.

President Joe Biden’s treasury secretary compared the daunting task to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which established the IMF and the basic framework of the global financial system following the devastation of World War II.

“Though it was a different time, I empathize with the enormous weight they faced; the pressure to come together after a global catastrophe in building an enduring and interconnected system aimed at promoting peace and prosperity throughout the world,” Yellen said. “Our current juncture is no less significant.”

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Supreme Court vacates ruling barring Trump from blocking Twitter critics, saying case is moot

InternationalApr 06. 2021Donald Trump

By The Washington Post · Robert Barnes

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday vacated a lower court opinion that said President Donald Trump could not block critics from his Twitter feed, which since has been suspended by the company.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York had ruled that because the president had used the forum to regularly communicate with the public, he could not block critical individual users. The case held implications for how elected officials nationwide interact with constituents on social media.

But Trump lost reelection, and Twitter canceled his account, leading the Supreme Court to tell the lower court to vacate the judgment and dismiss the case as moot.

There were no noted dissents from the order, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say the court at some point will need to examine the power of tech media companies.

It is “unprecedented,” Thomas wrote, to have “control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”

Thomas said it was true that some aspects of Trump’s account “resemble a constitutionally protected public forum.” But he said the real work for government might be to limit the ability of social media companies to remove users.

“If the aim is to ensure that speech is not smothered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves,” Thomas wrote. “As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms.”

The Justice Department had asked the Supreme Court to declare the case moot.

Because “the @realDonaldTrump account belongs to Mr. Trump personally, he will continue to have control over that account after his term of office has ended, subject to Twitter’s terms of service,” the department said in a brief. “After the inauguration, though, Mr. Trump will no longer be a party to this case, because respondents sued him only in his official capacity.”

Twitter suspended the account on Jan. 8, two days after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to reverse his election defeat by stopping lawmakers from tallying electoral-college votes.

The organization that brought the lawsuit, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, requested that the Supreme Court not disturb the lower court ruling, but it said the point has been made.

“This case was about a very simple principle that is foundational to our democracy: Public officials can’t bar people from public forums simply because they disagree with them,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, who argued the case before the Second Circuit.

“While we would have liked the Supreme Court to leave the Second Circuit’s ruling on the books, we’re gratified that the appeals court’s reasoning has already been adopted by other courts, and we’re confident it will continue to shape the way that public officials use social media.”

The case had been renamed Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute.

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China pushes vaccine on bankers, colleges to catch up with U.S.

InternationalApr 06. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

China is ramping up its covid-19 vaccination push, aiming to be twice as fast as the U.S. by pressuring Communist Party members, bank workers and college staff to get shots, as the lagging rollout threatens to undermine the advantage it secured by effectively wiping out the virus.

The inoculation effort has been stepped up markedly in recent weeks, with China now administering an average of 5 million doses a day from less than a million at the start of the year. While a significant increase, that translates to five doses for every 100 people, compared to 25 in the U.S. and 56 in Israel, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker.

Like other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that have quashed the coronavirus, China is facing significant hurdles in its vaccination drive, as people don’t see the same urgent need to get inoculated as those in places still battling covid-19. However, the prospect of other countries — particularly geopolitical rivals like the U.S. — achieving herd immunity and reopening their economies and borders sooner is hardening the resolve to speed up vaccinations in China.

“It will challenge the success of China’s covid response if developed countries are reopening to each other and China still tries to contain the virus from coming in,” said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University.

The Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control upped its vaccination target earlier this month, and now aims to get as many as 560 million people, or 40% of its vast population, injected by the end of June. That means China will need to give out some 460 million doses in the next three months — more than two times as much as the goal stated by U.S. President Joe Biden for roughly the same timespan.

Just as some in the U.S. are eligible for doughnuts after vaccination, part of China’s approach to get people to vaccinate involves dishing out freebies.

One poster in downtown Beijing, for example, says that residents over 60 are eligible for a basket of eggs after getting vaccinated. The city’s Daxing district, home to major technology companies, is luring residents by offering shopping coupons. On one such voucher, slogans encourage people to heed the call to get vaccinated to secure the ultimate covid victory.

Accompanying the accelerated rollout is also a hardening propaganda campaign that increasingly links vaccination to maintaining national pride and China’s place on the world stage.

“Injecting the coronavirus vaccine is not simply an option, it is the responsibility and duty of every Chinese citizen,” according to a news anchor on a program broadcast on state broadcaster CCTV last week. “If we do not rely on vaccinations to consolidate our hard-earned strengths in fighting the virus, we could suddenly slide from commanding heights to troughs.” The news clip has been distributed widely by community workers on chat groups to convince people to get vaccinated.

To achieve its goals, China is calling on its 92 million Communist Party members, plus tens of millions of people employed at state-owned companies.

Some party members have been summoned to meetings where they’ve been told to get shots as soon as possible to set an example, according to people familiar with the matter. At one such meeting in Beijing, cadres were told they had to get vaccinated unless they got a medical exemption.

Employees of at least three state-owned banks and at least one major university who would not speak on the record said that staff have been repeatedly urged to get vaccinated, and had to provide an official reason if they declined.

The information office of China’s State Council didn’t respond to requests for comment. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, or SASAC, which oversees China’s government-run companies, didn’t immediately respond to a fax seeking comment.

“We’ve seen populations of entire cities queue up and be tested within a few days, and the same kind of infrastructure could be used for mass vaccination,” said Benjamin Cowling, head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Hong Kong.

Indeed, China has experience in getting vaccination on such a large scale accomplished in the past. In 2010, the government launched a measles inoculation blitz, giving out 100 million doses to children around the country in 10 days to quell a resurgence in the disease.

The question is whether the current approach, comprising of small incentives and societal and peer pressure, can get China’s vaccination numbers sufficiently high enough in the face of widespread vaccine hesitancy.

Observers expect officials may need to escalate incentives, for example using punitive measure like restricting the movement of people who haven’t been inoculated.

Cowling said that the government could further link vaccination status with the existing health code system, which allows vaccinated people to travel more easily and perhaps be exempt from some quarantine policies.

Some local officials are already escalating measures: a city in Hainan province put out posters warning that if people didn’t get vaccinated they would be blacklisted, and barred from public transport, receiving government subsidies and other benefits. The city government later apologized for the harshness of the notice and rescinded the rules.

Lin Liwei, 35, a migrant worker in Beijing, is waiting to receive her second dose of the vaccine. Lin fears that she wouldn’t be allowed to board a train to return home to Inner Mongolia if she isn’t inoculated.

“If you’re not vaccinated, you’re out,” said Lin.

For the time being, the government is still waiting to see how far the existing approach can get them in the vaccination drive, said Seton Hall’s Huang. It could ultimately move to make vaccines compulsory, as some other countries like Indonesia have done.

“I don’t think China would mind eventually making vaccination mandatory considering they have implemented far more draconian measures,” said Huang. “As long as you have the vaccine supply and the ability to widely administer shots, it won’t be a problem to make vaccination an obligation.”

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is offering two at-home coronavirus tests a week to everyone in England

InternationalApr 06. 2021British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

By The Washington Post · William Booth

LONDON – The British government announced Monday that it will offer every citizen in England two at-home rapid coronavirus tests a week, in an audacious, costly bid to reopen the economy while avoiding another wave of infections.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is betting that relentless, repeated testing for as many people as possible – including those who feel perfectly fine – will help break transmission chains, limit future outbreaks, and get people back to work, sporting events, theaters and normal life.

The country’s fast-moving vaccination campaign has administered at least one dose to nearly half the population, but adults under 50 in England could still be waiting until May for their first jab, and scientists don’t yet know how easily vaccinated people can transmit the virus. So the ability to test and trace is still seen as critical to keeping the virus in check.

The prime minister promised the free, simple tests will help “to stop outbreaks in their tracks, so we can get back to seeing the people we love and doing the things we enjoy.”

But questions remain about who will bother to take the tests. The United States has seen a dramatic decline in demand for testing, as the public instead looks to vaccines as the way to end the pandemic.

And if the self-administered tests show an infection, will people accurately report that to the government and then stay home? A recent review in the BMJ, a medical journal, found that only 42% of symptomatic Britons were following isolation rules.

Many in Britain are also concerned that Johnson’s mass testing will soon dovetail with a parallel effort to create “covid status certificates,” or vaccine passports.

The certificates – which would probably appear on a mobile phone app – would show whether an individual has been vaccinated, recently tested negative for the virus or has natural immunity due to previous infection within the past six months. These data would come from the public health service and self-reports.

The government said Monday that the certificates could be useful for mass gatherings, and it will begin experimenting with them for attendance at an upcoming comedy festival and a few sporting events. Johnson dismissed the idea they would be needed to enter a shop or pub garden.

Still, there continues to be strong opposition. One reporter asked at Monday’s news conference whether such documents were un-British. More than 70 members of Parliament have launched a campaign to oppose them.

Britain is slowly exiting its third national lockdown. A week from now, England will reopen nonessential shops, gyms, hair salons and barber shops, and pubs and restaurants will be allowed to serve meals and drinks outdoors.

“As we continue to make good progress on our vaccine program and with our road map cautiously easing restrictions underway, regular rapid testing is even more important to make sure those efforts are not wasted,” Johnson said.

Starting Friday, people in England will be offered lateral flow testing kits, which can be used at home, with nasal and throat swabs, and give results in less than 30 minutes. The regional governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales may soon follow.

The tests can be ordered through the mail from National Health Service (NHS) or picked up at pharmacies or testing centers, or from employers.

Speaking on the BBC, Health Minister Edward Argar said the tests would be paid for by a $50 billion NHS fund to support its test-and-trace effort, which has struggled.

The program remains controversial among some scientists, who question whether the cost and effort are worth it. They say that without better incentives for people who test positive to stay at home, most will not. They also warn of the potentially large number of cases missed by the tests, which are far speedier but less accurate than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. A mass testing experiment in Liverpool last year showed the rapid test kits most widely used in Britain missed more than half of infections in asymptomatic people.

Supporters of mass testing say it doesn’t really matter – on a population scale – whether the tests miss some cases, as long as they help alert a large number of people with no symptoms that they might be infected and persuade them to stay home.

Those who test positive will be told to self-isolate, along with their household. They will also be encouraged to get a more accurate PCR test, and if that one says they are not infected, then they are free to go about their lives.

The program to mass test the population was first floated last year as “Operation Moonshot,” a plan to test 10 million people a day, or everyone in the country every week, at a cost of $130 billion. That program envisioned people being tested before they go to work, attend sporting matches or other mass gatherings.

At that time, many scientists were skeptical. “This is not going to work,” said Jon Deeks, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, who dismissed Moonshot as the work of bureaucrats and consultants, not scientists.

Giving 10 million tests a day would certainly be a stretch. Currently, Britain records 1.2 million daily tests.

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Robert Mundell, Nobel laureate who inspired the euro, dies at 88

InternationalApr 06. 2021Robert Mundell

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Nancy Moran, Shobhana Chandra

Robert Mundell, the Nobel Prize-winner and supply-side economist who was considered the intellectual father of the euro, has died. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by Sophia Johnson, assistant director of the program for economic research at Columbia University, where Mundell was professor emeritus.

A Columbia University professor of economics, Mundell won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999 for his theory that flexible markets, including the free movement of labor and capital, are necessary for a single-currency zone to succeed. His research helped lay the foundation for the euro, set up by 11 European governments earlier that year.

“The political glue inside Europe to keep it together — the euro — is the best thing going for it since the creation of the Common Market,” Mundell said in a 2012 interview with Bloomberg. “The end game is going to be deeper integration in Europe and more centralization of the fiscal authority.”

Mundell was also considered an architect of supply-side economics, primarily focused on the lowering of marginal tax rates to incentivize the production and consumption of goods and services. President Ronald Reagan embraced that philosophy in the form of tax cuts and inflation control that helped produce economic growth of 7.3% in 1984, the strongest in three decades.

An advocate of free markets, open trade and limited government, Mundell supported fixed-exchange rates. In 2009, in the aftermath of the world’s worst recession since the 1930s, he renewed his call for the European currency to be fixed against the dollar, saying exchange-rate swings had caused imbalances that led to the global financial crisis.

His views diverged with the late Milton Friedman, also a Nobel winner, who said that flexible exchange rates are more conducive to trade because they adjust automatically while letting a country control its own money supply.

Later in his career, Mundell proposed a world currency, the “DEY” — a basket of U.S. dollars, euros and yen — as a way to stabilize financial markets under a new international monetary system.

In the early 1960s, he laid out independently, with the late Marcus Fleming, a model that asserts a country can’t simultaneously pursue a fixed exchange rate, free capital flows and an independent monetary policy — the “impossible trinity.”

The most relevant aspect of his work was the theoretical cornerstone for the euro. Europe needed unifying frameworks and institutions, such as the Economic and Monetary Union established by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, to foster peace on the continent and compete with the U.S. and China. The euro, considered the biggest economic experiment of the 21st century, took the region’s economic and political integration to the next level.

“It’s very difficult to attribute such a complex project to a single person, but certainly in terms of intellectual inspiration, he has played a very important role,” former European Central Bank board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said in a February 2016 interview.

Robert Alexander Mundell was born Oct. 24, 1932, in Kingston, Ontario, in Canada, one of four sons to William Mundell and the former Lila Knifton. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia in 1953 and his masters a year later from the University of Washington in Seattle, according to Marquis Who’s Who.

In 1956, he earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also became a postdoctoral fellow in political economics at the University of Chicago, where he met Friedman.

His academic career included stints at the University of British Columbia, Stanford University, the University of Chicago and Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies. In 1974, he joined Columbia University.

Mundell advised the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and was also a consultant to governments in the U.S., Canada, Latin America and China.

He was an outspoken critic on economic and political issues. In November 2008, he questioned President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to raise U.S. income taxes for the highest earners, proposing instead a cut in corporate taxes to as low as 15% from 35%.

In December 2009, he said that Federal Reserve policies had helped trigger the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. by allowing the dollar to rise in the months before the investment bank’s bankruptcy. A year later, he criticized the Fed’s unconventional monetary policy actions, arguing it had been “negligent” in not anticipating so-called quantitative easing would have the undesired effect of pushing up the dollar.

Mundell was prepared for Europe’s economic and currency union to be an ongoing process, and “he understood perfectly that you wouldn’t have the perfect euro from the start,” Bini Smaghi said.

“In facilitating the agglomeration of the European economies to rival those of the U.S. and China, Mundell’s work was critical,” said Stephen Jen, co-founder and chief executive of London-based Eurizon SLJ Capital and a former IMF economist.

Mundell was also an early advocate of getting the IMF to consider adding China’s yuan to its Special Drawing Rights valuation basket, predicting it would eventually become a reserve currency. The yuan eventually won that status from the institution in November 2015.

Mundell and his first wife, Barbara Sheff, had three children: Paul, William and Robyn. After the couple the divorced, he married Valerie Natsios in 1998 and they had a son, Nicholas, according to Who’s Who.