US protections would worsen crisis: Murdoch

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch says the next US president must resist the temptation to introduce more protectionist trade policies to try to

deal with global financial crisis.

The News Corp. chairman and chief executive said imposing new US tariffs on Chinese imports could set off a trade battle that would worsen the slowdown in the global economy.

``For the past three or four years, some Democrats have been threatening to do things like put on extra tariffs (against Chinese imports) if they don't change their currency,'' Murdoch was quoted as saying in an interview published Saturday.

``If it happened, it could set off retaliatory action which would certainly damage the world economy seriously,'' he told The Weekend Australian, one of the papers he owns in his birth country.

Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News Channel, Dow Jones & Co. and MySpace as well as a stable of newspapers in Australia and Britain, said he was not sure that Barack Obama would implement protectionist measures mooted by some Democrats if he were elected president next week.

The newspaper did not cite Murdoch as endorsing either presidential candidate, Obama or his Republican rival John McCain.

Murdoch warned that a rise in protectionism in the United States ``could add to all sorts of tensions in the world financial system and the world trading system and eventually all the way down to employment.''

``I am not saying all these things are going to happen, but we are living in a dangerous period,'' he said.

Murdoch, who is now an American citizen based in New York, regularly visits Australia to visit family and check on his businesses here. On his current visit, he is due to give a series of lectures on the future direction of Australia, and will reportedly give a dissertation on the future of the newspaper industry.

He said politicians had limited power to fix the global financial crisis, but their actions could worsen it.

``To some extent it is beyond the power of politicians,'' he said. ``You are going to find that the politicians are very limited in what they can do: they can make it worse but they can't stop it.''

Source: EconomicTimes