Bill Gates has a message for Bill Clinton on how to manage US trade with Japan – don’t try: in an interview with Dow Jones & Co, Gates strongly opposed the activist policies that the Clinton administration and other US high-tech firms are promoting – Every time you interfere in these markets, you have overall net negative effects, and in most cases, the opposite of the effect you intended to have, Gates said – why don’t people just capture that in their minds, that screwing around with markets is tricky stuff? – It’s terrible, it’s subverting the market mechanism; in particular he criticised the US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement that simply pushed up the cost of memory chips for US users.
