Bloomsbury Academic International Trade under President Reagan: US Trade Policy in the 1980s

Under the Reagan presidency, the United States saw a period of strong economic growth. Analyzing the evolution of US foreign trade and its impact on the economy under the Reagan administration, Giuseppe La Barca shows how their economic achievements came about in part through well-exploited luck and reaffirmation of the supremacy of US economic interests. In stimulating its economy by consuming more than it produced, the US caused a growing trade deficit, appreciation of the dollar and an inflow of foreign capital that attracted prolonged differential interest rates. Offering a critical analysis of the evolution of US foreign trade and its impact on the national economy during the 1980s, this book shows how domestic and international economic policies shaped one another, and the impact they had in an increasingly globalizing world. Review As part of the team that helped create 500 Days of Summer, I would confess that we were not necessarily trying to make a work of art that would busy cultural critics and academics a decade later. Rather, we were trying to take a beloved genre and turn it on its head. To do so, our writers, directors, editors, and actors reinvented the narrative structure of the romantic comedy, bent (to a degree) the gender expectations of the form, and utilized architecture, music, and California's urban landscape to invoke an earlier generation of films-- Annie Hall and The Graduate--but also to signal something new. What is so exciting about reading Professor Waldrep's work is that many of the decisions that we made that were instinctual, he makes explicit. It is almost surreal to learn so many new things about the film that I was honored to help make, and to understand better its place within the culture. --Jessica Tuchinsky, Producer, 500 Days of Summer In this wide-ranging, illuminating study, Shelton Waldrep shows how pornography has thoroughly infiltrated mainstream cinema and television, influencing visual representation formally as well as thematically. “Pornification,” rather than the object of jeremiad, is subject in The Space of Sex to thoughtful critical analysis. A most welcome book. --Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA About the Author Giuseppe La Barca is an independent scholar, having previously held the position of Honorary Research Associate at the University of Swansea, UK. The author of International Trade in the 1970s (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The US, the EC and World Trade (Bloomsbury, 2016), he is an expert on the economy of the United States in modern history.