Sen. Brown Statement on Treasury Department's Semi-Annual Currency Report

Article continues below...

Report Fails to Indicate Chinese Currency Manipulation

October 15, 2009 -- WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) issued the following statement in response to today’s release of the U.S. Department of Treasury’s semiannual Report to Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies:

“China’s unfair currency manipulation hurts Ohio manufacturers and workers. For the better part of this decade, the federal government has ignored this unfair advantage while our trade deficit with China has grown from $85 billion in 1999 to $268 billion in 2008. As a result, we have lost more than four million manufacturing jobs. Best estimates show that currency manipulation amounts to a 40 percent subsidy for Chinese products.

“While I applaud President Obama’s recent call to rebalance the global economy, I would like to see a more aggressive approach to correcting this unfair trade advantage that is widely acknowledged by almost everyone but the U.S. Treasury Department. American manufacturers can and will compete – but we need a trade policy that invests in their ingenuity and cracks down on currency manipulation.”

Source: Senator Sherrod Brown