The week's top news and analysis

The markets took a day off at the start of the week, but the weekly news cycle barely skipped a beat. Satellite rivals XM and Sirius, in fact, coaxed their hyperactive-investor constituencies into post-holiday mode about 18 hours early. Spirited discussions of the presidential achievements and historical significances of Washington and Lincoln were brought to hasty conclusion.

The satellite-radio-business hookup lit a fire not only under the discussion boards but under the two companies' stocks. They were among the standouts as the week's trading got underway and sustained a healthy proportion of their early-week gains through Friday. As did the Nasdaq, on which both stocks are listed.

Feature economy of United States of America

U.S. foreign trade and global economic policies have changed direction dramatically during the more than two centuries that the United States has been a country. In the early days of the nation's history, government and business mostly concentrated on developing the domestic economy irrespective of what went on abroad. But since the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, the country generally has sought to reduce trade barriers and coordinate the world economic system. This commitment to free trade has both economic and political roots; the United States increasingly has come to see open trade as a means not only of advancing its own economic interests but also as a key to building peaceful relations among nations.


The United States dominated many export markets for much of the postwar period a result of its inherent economic strengths, the fact that its industrial machine was untouched by war, and American advances in technology and manufacturing techniques. By the 1970s, though, the gap between the United States' and other countries' export competitiveness was narrowing. What's more, oil price shocks, worldwide recession, and increases in the foreign exchange value of the dollar all combined during the 1970s to hurt the U.S. trade balance. U.S. trade deficits grew larger still in the 1980s and 1990s as the American appetite for foreign goods consistently outstripped demand for American goods in other countries. This reflected both the tendency of Americans to consume more and save less than people in Europe and Japan and the fact that the American economy was growing much faster during this period than Europe or economically troubled Japan.

Mounting trade deficits reduced political support in the U.S. Congress for trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. Lawmakers considered a wide range of protectionist proposals during these years, many of them from American industries that faced increasingly effective competition from other countries. Congress also grew reluctant to give the president a free hand to negotiate new trade liberalization agreements with other countries. On top of that, the end of the Cold War saw Americans impose a number of trade sanctions against nations that it believed were violating acceptable norms of behavior concerning human rights, terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Despite these setbacks to free trade, the United States continued to advance trade liberalization in international negotiations in the 1990s, ratifying a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), completing the so-called Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, and joining in multilateral agreements that established international rules for protecting intellectual property and for trade in financial and basic telecommunications services.

Still, at the end of the 1990s, the future direction of U.S. trade policy was uncertain. Officially, the nation remained committed to free trade as it pursued a new round of multilateral trade negotiations; worked to develop regional trade liberalization agreements involving Europe, Latin America, and Asia; and sought to resolve bilateral trade disputes with various other nations. But political support for such policies appeared questionable. That did not mean, however, that the United States was about to withdraw from the global economy. Several financial crises, especially one that rocked Asia in the late 1990s, demonstrated the increased interdependence of global financial markets. As the United States and other nations worked to develop tools for addressing or preventing such crises, they found themselves looking at reform ideas that would require increased international coordination and cooperation in the years ahead.
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