In the FT, Chad Bown warns that the Obama administration risks unleashing a global “crisis-driven mob mentality” that will impose numerous trade protections if the US imposes new import restrictions on Chinese tires under its “China safeguard” law. He highlights a number of concerns, but this one stood out:

[A] little-known loophole in the rules governing China’s 2001 WTO accession makes it easy for a global protectionist response to spread faster and further than that which took hold in 2002. Nowadays, once any one country imposes a China safeguard on imports, all other WTO members can immediately follow suit, without investigating whether their own industries have been injured.