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A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that only 28 percent of Americans say free trade deals are beneficial while 46 percent say they are harmful. In December 1999, 39 percent were positive about free trade and 30 percent negative. The new French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls unrestricted free trade a ``policy of naivete.''
 
One key trait of a bear market is fragmentation and this is very apparent in a mover from multi-lateral deals like NAFTA to bilateral deals in which the U.S. makes side deals with one country at a time. This process tends to play various countries off against one another and can be as exclusionary as it is inclusionary:  “Increasingly, governments seem to want to pick their own partners,'' says Ira Shapiro, a former U.S. trade negotiator.  But even these deals are having trouble lately. Deals with Peru, Panama, Columbia and South Korea are under fire from lawmakers.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal also reveals that one of the most important tools in the drive to eliminate trade barriers, “fast track authority,” which allows the president to side step interest group haggling over protected industries with an up-or-down Congressional approval, faces a death sentence at the end of the month. Without the authority, trading partners generally will not “deal with the U.S.” because they know any agreement will be picked apart by special interests.

In a key quote, Susan Sechler, director of trade and development for the German Marshall Fund, a trans-Atlantic think tank, told the WSJ, “The overall signal is: Once again, we can't get ourselves together...and we're turning in on ourselves [emphasis added]."  This is the change from “everyone is a potential friend” to “everyone is a potential enemy,” which is one of the fundamental socionomic that a society undergoes in a bear market. As noted in the quote above, everyone knows protectionism is a giant step backward, but the inward turn is happening because it’s not driven by reason, it is the first step in social psychology in social psychology from an outlook of trust and compromise that got the free trade bandwagon rolling at the front edge of the bull market in the late 1940s. Just a preliminary taste of the fear and envy discussed above is producing a radical departure from 60 years of trade breakthroughs. Back in November, when it was generally believed that the Doha trade talks were back on track, Socio Times discussed some early harbingers of “impediments to free trade going forward.”  Bear markets events sometimes cast a shadow over the landscape ahead of the bear's actual arrival. Few things are as charged with negative emotional energy as protectionism.  So it probably makes sense that global trade is one area where the bear market has a running start.