Export Grants

Posts Tagged ‘barack obama’

Barack Obama believes that updating export restrictions with historic roots in the Cold War to help create new jobs and boost economic growth.

We are losing business opportunities unnecessarily. We’re also, I actually think, impeding effective monitoring of our national security because if you have export controls across everything you’re not spending time focusing on the handful of things that really do touch on sensitive national security. It’s going to be entirely grounded in our national security needs but I think will have a strong potential impact on where we can go in terms of exports. This is something we believe in and we want to continue to pursue.

U.S. companies have complained for years that they are loosing out on lucrative government sponsored contracts to Europe and Asia because many rules were put in place 30 years ago to prevent high value technology to find its way to Russia. Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to lay out plans for revamping U.S. export controls in the coming days to help facilitate this. The Milken Institute recently completed a study sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers and they estimate that modernizing these controls would boost economic output by $65 billion dollars and have the potential to create over 150,000 manufacturing jobs.

Export controls were last attempted to be revamped early in 2001, however when the September 11th attacks took place, these negotiation never were able to be put to a vote through congress. Currently exports of high technological value are approved on a transaction-by-transaction approach which has a huge backlog. Changes will also help different government agencies to work together rather then with competing goals.

Exports dropped 0.3% in so far in 2010, however economists predict this mearly to be a blip and exports will be be a bright spot for job creation through the rest of 2010. Except for Euope where the dollar has risen against the euro over worries about EU member nations debt crisis, the greenback has slid against other major currencies which has historically lead to an increase in exports due to foreign currecies purchase power.

In January the trade deficit shrank unexpectidly by 6.6% to $37.3 billion dollars, the biggest in over a year. Imports over the same period had dropped by 1.7% because more americans have decided to save their money rather go out and make purchases from manufactures abroad. Oil imports fell sharpy along with automobile sales from Japan and Europe.

The small drop in January was the first after eight straight months of increases. Nigel Gault, cheif economist at IHS Global Inisght said belives that:

We believe U.S. export growth will continue. This month’s drop in trade volumes doesn’t mean that the trade recovery is over.

The massive US debt is what is keeping the downward dollar low at the moment and making American exports more competative will help to even further close the trade gap. President Barack Obama has vowed to bring the deficit under control despite all this, but is seen as a more long term goal and exporters will be able take advantage of this for many years to come.