Jocelyn Arceo
Staff Writer
Justin Hughes, professor of law at Loyola Marymount and the 2017 Model United Nations Speaker of the Year, discussed “The United States and International Trade” Wednesday in the Campus Center Ballroom.
He began his talk by pointing out how little attention most shoppers pay to where products are manufactured.
“Fifty years ago, if your grandparents were American, their corresponding pieces of clothing … were almost certainly made in the United States,” Hughes said.
This led into a discussion on international trade and the attempts made at establishing an organization dedicated to regulating it.
After World War II, there was a need for peace among the nations, which is how the United Nations came about, Hughes said.
“If you credit our 20th century ancestors with doing anything right, credit them with seeing that that destruction should not be repeated and realizing that they needed to shape a future that would be more peaceful,” he added.
Even before World War II ended, many of the nation’s leaders understood that there was going to be a dire need for something to be done about the world’s postwar economy, Hughes said.
With that, both American and British diplomats sought international institutions they felt were necessary to stabilize and improve the world economy as a whole.
“The World Bank, which is headquartered now in Washington D.C. is designed to provide long term loans for economic development and poverty reduction,” Hughes said.
“Those loans are made possible by member countries putting in their contributions, and by bonds the world bank issues.”
Aside from the World Bank, they also came up with the International Monetary Fund, or the IMF.
“The IMF was supposed to worry about short term and medium term problems, particularly the fluctuations in a country’s currency,” Hughes said.
A few years after this, in 1948, there was a plan to eventually form a United Nations-like organization for trade, the International Trade Organization, Hughes said.
“In a moment of America first or America only, the United States senate said ‘no, we won’t ratify this.’ And without the United States there was no point in having this organization,” Hughes said.
Because the International Trade Organization was rejected, there were multiple failed attempts afterward for something similar, Hughes said.
He added that these attempts were the General Agreement on Tariff and Trades, or GATT, and the Most Favored Nation principle.
“He made it very easy to follow,” sophomore political science major Sawyeh Salehpour said. “I easily understood what he was talking about.”
Sophomore political science major James Martinez agreed, and said he thought about how he would respond to Hughes and the points he made.
“I just never thought about any of that before,” Martinez said.
Today, the United States has a 15 percent gross domestic product of international products, which is significantly larger than the 4.2 percent back in 1960.
“It is through that mechanism, through decades and decades, that the international trade system brought down tariffs so that there was a more globalized economy,” Hughes said.
Carlos Sanchez, junior international business and language major, said he learned about the things Hughes discussed in his international relations class only a few hours before the talk.
Sanchez said he thought the most interesting aspect of the discussion was learning about how passive the United States is when it comes to competition.
“I didn’t know whether or not the U.S. will continue to lose because of no willpower,” Sanchez said.
Jocelyn Arceo can be reached at jocelyn.arceo@laverne.edu.
