Lazy Boys Shakedown Chinese Furniture Makers

James Hagerty at the WSJ has an excellent piece showing how trade policy really works at the ground floor level:

Some U.S. furniture makers and their lawyers have found a reliable way to extract cash from Chinese competitors deemed by U.S. officials to have “dumped” their products in the U.S., selling them at unfairly low prices.

Each year since 2006, they have asked the Commerce Department to review the U.S. duties paid by Chinese manufacturers on imports of wooden bedroom furniture. Many Chinese firms, fearing a steep rise in duties, agreed within months each time to pay cash to their U.S. competitors in return for being removed from the review list.

“Everybody in the industry in the U.S. and China understands that these payments are clever shakedowns,” said William Silverman, a lawyer representing U.S. furniture retailers, big importers of Chinese products, at an October hearing of the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The Chinese firms have paid millions of dollars to Lay-Z-Boy (really, I am not making this up) other US furniture makers and to their bagmen lawyers to avoid having the ITC sicked on them. I suppose one could argue that the payments are an efficient way of redistributing the gains from trade. The question then becomes why are US firms assumed to own the rights to sell to US consumers?

Hat tip to Chuck Sicotte.

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