Another day, another major acquisition of a U.S. firm by a Chinese company. The $4.7 billion deal announced today in which China’s Shuanghui Group has agreed to buy the world’s biggest pork producer, Smithfield, is the largest such transaction to date, and nearly double the price paid last year by Dalian Wanda to acquire the U.S. movie theater company AMC. But in every other respect it is just another in a growing string of large, and only moderately controversial, Chinese purchases of U.S. firms. Read more »

Watching the Senate hearing yesterday with Apple chief executive Tim Cook, I came to the conclusion that there are some things the government should not be trying to do even if the reasons for doing so are obviously good ones. And one of those things is taxing corporations. Read more »

In the wake of the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh, I have been thinking a lot about the issue of corporate social responsibility. The factory was making clothes for western companies including Primark of the UK and Loblaws of Canada, and in many ways the clothing companies have been among the most focused in recent years at trying to police their supply chains to ensure safer working conditions and decent wages. Yet at least 430 people were killed working to meet deadlines set by western companies in a facility that should have been torn down years ago. Read more »

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust authority, announced a decision earlier this week to fine Microsoft $731 million for violating the terms of a previous antitrust settlement, which analysts say may constitute a warning to other dominant multinational firms and signals the EU’s willingness to go farther than their U.S. counterparts. Read more »

While freer trade makes everyone collectively richer, the impacts are unequal. There are winners and losers, and even among the winners there are some who gain a great deal and some who gain very little. The precise relationship between expanded globalization and rising income inequality remains in dispute, but economists now generally accept that freer trade, immigration and investment, along with technology, have played some significant role in the growing gap between the rich and poor and the shrinking middle class in the United States. Read more »

A new study released this week by the Pew Center for the States is further proof of the folly of state tax incentives as a way to attract job-creating business – though in its usual even-handed fashion Pew is careful not to say as much. The report shows that surprisingly few states make serious estimates of the potential cost of tax incentives they offer companies, and very few cap the total benefits, leaving the government exposed to large losses. Read more »

Two decades ago, the United States demanded that other countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) agree to significant restrictions on “trade distorting subsidies” of various sorts, such as government grants, tax breaks, or other benefits that would allow companies an unfair advantage against others in the international market. All well and good, but as the proverb has it: “Physician, heal thyself.” Read more »

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, has famously said that he has no wish to eliminate government, but only to “shrink it to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Americans up and down the east coast can be grateful in the wake of Hurricane Sandy that he has not yet succeeded, or they might well have drowned in their own homes. Read more »