James Goldsmith: A Prescient View of Free Trade

 

Tuesday 11/15/1994

A discussion on the General Agreement on Trade with Sir James Goldsmith and Laura D’Andrea Tyson.

  • Charlie Rose’s dismissive attitude towards Mr Goldsmith seems to reflect the establishment view.
  • Laura D’Andrea Tyson concedes his point about outsourcing, but says the horse is out of the barn and it won’t get worse.  She argues the Uruguay round will help American firms export more, while Goldsmith says instead that firms will setup factories in the lowest-cost developing world and ship to the developed world.

A prophetic interview with Sir James Goldsmith in 1994

Sir James Michael “Jimmy” Goldsmith (26 February 1933  18 July 1997) was an Anglo-French financier. Towards the end of his life, he became a magazine publisher and a politician. In 1994, he was elected to represent France as a Member of the European Parliament and he subsequently founded the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain.
In this interview, Sir Goldsmith discusses the ramifications of free-trade agreements that were about to take place in 1994 (GATT), as you can retrospectively see, he correctly predicted many of the things that happened after that.