I don’t think anybody is arguing that “massive deregulation” has been a characteristic of European financial policy, especially on the continent, in the last decade.

Not de jure deregulation a la the US, but de facto deregulation due to the growth of the regulated companies beyond the ability of the regulatory infrastructure to deal with them. The European economy is massively more integrated today than it was when Maastricht passed in 1993, but the regulatory clock effectively stopped then.

I don’t think anybody is arguing that “massive deregulation” has been a characteristic of European financial policy, especially on the continent, in the last decade. Yet they are under the same crisis, which suggests it might be something we have in common, such as a very easy money policy that made borrowing more attractive than investing in the wake of the tech bubble and 9/11.

Individual EU member states have their own regulations, but there’s no regulatory framework to manage institutions big enough to cross borders — a dire omission considering how large financial services companies have grown in the modern era.

Theoretically the EU can coordinate member states’ responses to a crisis, but in real life they’re constrained by the need to operate by consensus, which makes it nearly impossible to get anything done in an expeditious manner.

That leads to states taking actions on their own which may help their own interests at the expense of other EU members — like Ireland, whose move to implement generous deposit guarantees to ensure confidence in Irish banks has ended up deepening the crisis in Britain as depositors transfer their cash to ’safer’ Irish banks.

I’m sure there’s a trade-policy signal in this, but it’s going to be smaller than the problems caused by massive over-valuation of property, the plummeting dollar (in turn caused by massive government spending, both domestic and in Iraq), and the over-investment in home ownership (caused mostly by byzantine tax policies).

In point of fact, my previous financial advisor (whom I was largely unimpressed by and who is no longer in business) told me when discussing the possibility of buying a house “don’t put any money down, and get the most house you can afford, because mortgage money is the cheapest money out there.” No-money down and largest-possible is pretty much the definition of sub-prime. Her reasoning for this was to shelter as much money as possible from taxation.

The second is that after the VREs of the 80s and the tariffs of the 70s and the cheap oil of the 90s and the hidebound management of, well, all that time, Detroit makes crappy cars nobody wants. I’m not sure what government policies can fix that. A bailout (oh yes, they want one too) will just postpone the inevitable.

It has a third problem, in which it’s located in Michigan, not Ohio, so it really doesn’t have much to do with Ohio foreclosures.

“No, they should spend time proportionally to the degree to which their jobs have fled to a particular country. Which is why the country that most people talk about these days isn’t Canada, Ireland, or Mexico, it’s China.”

Um, no, the countries they’ve lost most of their jobs to are Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. And also Canada, where there are huge auto plants right across the international boundary. But if one imaginary line like the Brown People Line (I mean, uh, US-Mexican border) or the Yellow Peril Line (aka International Date Line) matters, then surely there’s no reason not to get upset over the Ohio-Kentucky line or the lines that separate Ohio from all the Southeastern states. If your zero-sum view of economics is correct, Ohio should secede and tax out-of-Ohio goods in order to create support for local businesses.

But hey, we’re on the heels of a massive financial crisis coupled with a stock market crash, why not go for the trifecta and reenact Smoot-Hawley.

Nobody was building luxury condos in Detroit, where you can buy a house for a dollar.

“As for manufacturing, George W. Bush put illegal tariffs on steel while Clinton was a truer champion of free trade than McCain.”

That’s true. To pass NAFTA, Clinton promised a lot of things — labor and environmental standards for trade, retraining for affected workers, etc — none of which ever came to pass.

“As I recall, the Nineties were pretty good for jobs.”

Not everywhere.

“As for racism, if trade opponents don’t want to be perceived as racist, they should spend as much time complaining about Canadians and Irish taking their jarbs as Mexicans.”

No, they should spend time proportionally to the degree to which their jobs have fled to a particular country. Which is why the country that most people talk about these days isn’t Canada, Ireland, or Mexico, it’s China.