The surface facts make abundantly clear that the case for the Ex-Im Bank is truly lame. In the most recent year (2013), its credit guarantees and other programs accounted for $37 billion of exports or less than 2% of the $2.2 trillion of exports generated by the US economy.  Moreover, by the bank’s own reckoning only about $12 billion of these Ex-Im deals deployed taxpayer subsidies in order to “meet competition from a foreign, officially sponsored export credit agency”. So suppose those latter export deals which purportedly faced unfair competition from foreign governments would not have happened absent Ex-Im financing. We are talking about 0.6% of exports and 0.1% of GDP. That is, we … Continue reading Kill the Export-Import Bank