America running the risk of self-inflicted economic wound

IN THIS bitter US presidential election campaign, one area of agreement unites the major candidates: trade. Bernie Sanders brags that he has opposed all recent trade agreements; Hillary Clinton now rejects the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), President Barack Obama's signature trade success that she once supported; and Donald Trump blames incompetent US trade negotiators for devastating job losses to China that might be cured by a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports.

You should take all this with a boulder of salt. True, a flood of Chinese imports over the past 15 years has cost hordes of US jobs. In a recent pap…