With Back-to-Back Bombshells, Trade Terrorism Hits the Global Aircraft Industry

This afternoon, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced thepreliminary results of its antidumping investigation in large civil aircraft from Canada, launched at the request of the Boeing Company in May. Commerce “calculated” dumping margins of 79.82 percent for Bombardier—the only Canadian aircraft producer in this market—which becomes the rate of duty that any U.S. purchaser would have to post with U.S. customs upon importation. This penalty comes on top of last week’s assessment of 219.63 percen t subsidy margins in the companioncountervailing duty case.It goes without saying that neither Delta Airlines (the intended customer) nor any other U.S. carrier is going to pay a 300 percent tax to purchase these aircraft. Unless the U.S. International Trade Commission rules in February 2018 that Boeing is not threatened with material injury by these proposed Bombardier sales, the orders will go into effect (requiring approximately 300 percent duties, although those figures will change —but probably only slightly—between the Commerce preliminary and final), putting the U.S. market out of reach to Bombardier, and Bombardier aircraft out of reach to the U.S. carriers, who need these smaller planes (which Boeing doesn’t even produce) to serve less-travelled routes efficiently.In aprevious post, I described some of the methodological shenanigans that Commerce was likely to perform in this case. Confirmation of those and other capricious decisions will be possible after...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs