By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience.

Leveraged loans,” extended to junk-rated and highly leveraged companies, are too risky for banks to keep on their books. Banks sell them to loan mutual funds, or they slice-and-dice them into structured Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and sell them to institutional investors. This way, the banks get the rich fees but slough off the risk to investors, such as asset managers and pension funds.

Expressing the opposite view is Paul Krugman, who writes, “Trade isn’t a zero-sum game: it raises the productivity and wealth of the world economy.” And the corollary also applies as well: any action taken to disrupt the free flow of goods between countries is likely to provoke a counter-reaction, the result being a trade war in which every country loses out
The two “sacred tenets,” free trade and comparative advantage, are inextricably linked.

After all, a “comparative advantage” begets the question, compared to what? We export goods to other nations when we can do that relatively better than they can and likewise import goods or services that we have a comparative disadvantage in producing.

So tropical fruit is exported from, say, Mexico or Chile, rather than from Canada. And Australia’s abundance of natural resources explains why it has become a mining superpower. Of course, this classical model of trade and comparative advantage breaks down somewhat in an ultra-globalized world in which capital accounts have been largely liberalized.

Leveraged loans,” extended to junk-rated and highly leveraged companies, are too risky for banks to keep on their books. Banks sell them to loan mutual funds, or they slice-and-dice them into structured Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and sell them to institutional investors. This way, the banks get the rich fees but slough off the risk to investors, such as asset managers and pension funds.

Expressing the opposite view is Paul Krugman, who writes, “Trade isn’t a zero-sum game: it raises the productivity and wealth of the world economy.” And the corollary also applies as well: any action taken to disrupt the free flow of goods between countries is likely to provoke a counter-reaction, the result being a trade war in which every country loses out
The two “sacred tenets,” free trade and comparative advantage, are inextricably linked.

After all, a “comparative advantage” begets the question, compared to what? We export goods to other nations when we can do that relatively better than they can and likewise import goods or services that we have a comparative disadvantage in producing.

So tropical fruit is exported from, say, Mexico or Chile, rather than from Canada. And Australia’s abundance of natural resources explains why it has become a mining superpower. Of course, this classical model of trade and comparative advantage breaks down somewhat in an ultra-globalized world in which capital accounts have been largely liberalized.