Standing Up for Trade.

• Author: Stephenson, E. Frank

Trade Is Not a Four Letter Word

By Fred P. Hochberg

336 pp.; Avid Reader

Press (Simon & Schuster), 2021

U.S. policy in recent years has not been favorable to free trade. Former president Donald Trump boasted that he was a "tariff man" while imposing tariffs on steel, aluminum, and finished goods such as washing machines. Trump also decided against having the United States join the Trans-Pacific Partnership and demanded that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) be renegotiated, though the ultimate revisions were relatively minor. (See "Is NAFTA 2.0 Better than Nothing?" Winter 2018-2019.) While President Biden has scaled back some of Trump's tariffs, he has kept and even extended others. Free trade could use a friend right about now.

Into that role steps Fred Hochberg with Trade Is Not a Four-Utter Word. As a young man, Hochberg was an executive of family company Lillian Vernon, a direct marketing firm with suppliers in many countries, including China. Later, he headed the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) for eight years during the Obama administration, so he has both private sector and governmental international trade experience. Hochberg's noble goal in Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word is "to puncture the myths, unpack the arguments, and connect all the dots so [readers] can see the full picture of what trade really is."

Before discussing the book, it is worth noting two things that it is not. First, it is not solely a response to the Trump administration's protectionist policies. To be sure, Hochberg criticizes those policies, but there is much more to the book than rehashing Trump's awful trade agenda. Second, it is not merely an advertisement for EXIM. The book plays up EXIM in several places--including a thinly veiled response to critics who deride it as the "Bank of Boeing"--but overall EXIM is a fairly small part of the book.

The book is organized in three parts: the first consists of three chapters on trade history and myths about trade; the second is six chapters about six products that Hoch berg argues make the case for trade; and the third consists of two chapters ostensibly devoted to (unpleasant) realities about trade and remedies to them. Rather than discussing the book along the lines of its organization, I think it is more useful to discuss how it treats important trade concepts such as imports, tariffs, and trade deficits because they are discussed across multiple chapters.

Virtue of imports/ Hochberg defines trade as...