Should it stay or should it go? It is little more than thinly disguised corporate welfare.
It should go. Its just another market distorting corporate subsidy at taxpayer expense.
If it were to go wouldn't it put American companies (and the US economy) at a competitive disadvantage? Hint: the answer is yes because most other industrialized countries have similar subsidies. The result of shutting the ex-im bank would be that the US economy would grow less then it otherwise would and jobs would be relocated overseas that would otherwise be competitive in the US.
Just because other countries tax their people in order to sell things to us at under-market prices, we should that favor in return?
Is the goal is to move manufacturing into this country in those industries so that we can get the secrets of foreign production techniques?
Is there a special interest for subsidizing a particular industry at the expense of all the others for strategic reasons?
If we don't do this then our companies will be at an international disadvantage. if they are at a disadvantage like this then they would need to employ less people, which would shrink the tax base. if the tax base is less then in order to collect the same tax revenue overall tax rates will need to rise.
Doing it also puts "our" companies at an international disadvantage.
It marries them to the state, making them dependent on subsidy so fatter and lazier than needed. That it does so by killing off other companies that would have survived but for the marginal tax to support the favored few (minus the losses by running it through the bureaucracy) is a bit of economic self destruction.
Doing this sort of thing does accomplish something, it creates the new industry of government begging for the folks that lobby for these handouts. GDP measures that as a plus, but it oughtn't. It produces nothing.
What the ex-im bank does is reduce counter-party risk for American companies. If for example a foreign company wanted to buy $100 million dollars worth of light-bulbs from GE, then GE could use the ex-im bank to guarantee this payment while they are producing these light-bulbs. If GE's customer were to default then GE would still get paid and the light-bulbs would be given to the ex-im bank to sell or otherwise dispose of. In this situation, without the ex-im bank, GE would either need to take on more credit risk, produce a better light-bulb, charge less then the competition, or a combination of the three to be on a level playing field then it's competitors. If they did not then they would be at a disadvantage and would likely receive much fewer sales as a foreign company could buy the light-bulbs of a similar quality at a similar price on better terms from someone else. There is no way to use efficiency to solve this issue.
This hits it on the nail. All the export-import really does is guarantee sales for US companies to foreign firms. If the foreign firm were to fail and/or be unable to pay then the export-import bank would essentially buy the goods from the US company and attempt to sell them itself. This prevents potential oversupply of goods which is a major cause of recessions.