Obama, eyeing China, to boost export financing

President Barack Obama will announce an effort to streamline financing for US exporters competing with foreign firms that get "unfair advantages," the White House said on Friday, as China's leader-in-waiting completes a US visit that has stoked trade tensions.
Obama is set to unveil the trade assistance plan on a visit to airplane manufacturer Boeing, one of the top American exporters, as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping wraps up his US visit that has focused largely on trade. "China and other global competitors often provide unfair advantages to help their companies win business overseas," the White House said in the statement released before Obama flew to Seattle from California, where he has been fundraising for his re-election.
"The president will not allow US companies and workers to lose out on valuable business due to unfair export financing, and will use the administration's full powers to ensure that they are competing on an even footing," the White House said. Obama is taking steps to ensure "the Export-Import Bank can provide US firms competing for domestic or third-country sales with matching financing support," the White House said.
The assistance is meant "to counter foreign non-competitive official financing that fails to observe international discipline," according to the White House statement, which was backed up by a conference call with US officials. It was not clear how much trade financing - normally lines of credit or short-term loans - could emerge from the shift. The White House said other countries like China, Brazil, Canada, Germany and India now offer more export credit financing as a share of their economies than the United States.
Obama also will call for Congress to swiftly reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, which has been operating on a temporary extension that expires in May. A conservative Republican group, Club for Growth, has criticised the bank as "corporate welfare" and urged lawmakers to allow it to die. "Unless the Bank's authorisation is renewed, and its lending cap is raised to an appropriate level, the Bank will be forced into the unprecedented position of having to halt all new transactions," the White House said.
Because of strong demand for its services in recent years, the bank is close to its current lending cap of $100 billion. With many Americans in electoral swing states out of work - having seen manufacturing jobs move to China and factories close because of cheap Chinese exports - trade is a sensitive ahead of the November 6 presidential and congressional elections.
After meeting with China's vice president at the White House, Obama travelled to Wisconsin on Wednesday to highlight a US company that "insourced" jobs back to the United States from China as a sign of US economic rebound. Mitt Romney, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination to face Obama in November, blasted Obama's policies on China as too soft, and said if elected he would immediately hit back at "abusive Chinese practices" hurting the US economy.
"A trade war with China is the last thing I want, but I cannot tolerate our current trade surrender," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial on Thursday. In January, Obama asked Congress to give him the authority to streamline the US government's trade promotion work, with the goal of bringing together the current "maze" of interlinked bodies into a single new department focused on exports.
Lisa Brown of the White House Office of Management and Budget said the steps to be announced on Friday - including a new "BusinessUSA" website for firms needing export help - should help simplify things while Capitol Hill mulls that request. The White House said the United States is ahead of schedule to double exports by 2014, one of Obama's key economic goals.