Donald Trump trumped as US Senate votes to reinstate ZTE ban The United States Senate has passed an amendment that reinstates the ban on Chinese telecoms concern ZTE doing business with US-based companies. President Trump said he’d secured a reversal of the ban as a personal favour to Chinese president Xi Jinping in the hope that the show of good faith would ease trade negotiations …
A bit reassuring, really, what with the Republicans still blindly pretending to support Trump and the Democrats totally incapable of any action whatsoever, it is reassuring to see that there are still some people in high places who are actually interested in pretending to work for US interests and not for their own.
Caveat : I do not know those senators and have no idea whose campaign funds they are defending.
Given how much trade happens between China and the US (mostly cheap tat and/or the products of cheap/dirty labour from China and technology, knowledge and specialized products from the US) this coming trade war will be detrimental mostly for the US.
I doubt going this route without proper isolationist inland politics to back it up is a stupid idea and will hurt the US in the long run. It'll probably benefit some senators in the pockets of companies who think they can make a buck or 2 extra from this whole deal though.
The people that have to pay more for their purchases or lose their jobs. It's a stealth tax because it's not like the government is going to use it to offset their tariffs so it doesn't matter who has a deficit with who. I may be wrong with this assumption so please feel free to correct.
"this coming trade war will be detrimental mostly for the US."
If the end result of the trade war is that it will be impossible to find tons and tons of cheap Chinese made stuff-that-no-one-really-needs-but-gets-bought-anyway-cos-its-cheap tat, I think the US will be on o a winner!
Walmart alone buys something like $50 billion worth of stuff from China every year. If they start getting hit with a 25% tariff on any significant portion of that then guess who will end up paying for it. Hint, it won't be Walmart.
If their prices go up, and sales go down then you can also expect layoffs, and if it goes on long enough then possibly even store closures.
"Are you including Apple gear in that? Or is Foxconn the only Chinese manufacturer employing unicorns?"
No, actually I wasn't thinking of Apple at all. Mostly what I had in mind was those dozens of gadgets, gizmos and widgets that you never actually wanted to buy but saw at the store, thought "that looks interesting, and it's only $x ", then it gets used once and ends up in the back of a drawer, or breaks after a few uses, or never actually works as well as you thought it might etc.
ZTE was banned from dealing with US firms for flouting laws about exporting to Iran and North Korea.
Question: Who is the US to say that x cannot trade with y ?
Answer: Nobody anymore, because they have pissed off too many former allies with a silly trade war. He cannot be trusted as he lacks the balls to tell people in face what he thinks, only to volte-face when he is safe in the air. He is not bound by any treaties signed in the past ...
China and Russia have already vowed to ignore any USian injunctions, I cannot see how the EU could not do likewise ... the result of this would be the end of the reserve currency and thus the fall of the USian superpower.
I honestly never thought Tramp would be brain-dead enough to pull this one off in his first term ...
thus the fall of the USian superpower.
I once got into trouble when I worked at $LARGE_US_TELECOMS_MANUFACTURER for having a printout pinned to my cube wall[1] which had a Soviet flag at one end and a US flag at the other with the words "Two evil empires, one down, one to go" between them..
[1[ Doesn't that phrase just scream "US Corporate"?
Possessing some brains cells filled with knowledge of facts always comes in handy before raging against the honorable president Trump. The US can shutdown ZTE because they produce the technology ZTE needs to make its gear. By prohibiting US companies selling those components to ZTE, it is effectively shutdown, and thus bankrupt.
So until the Chinese manage to steal the IP of the goods ZTE needs to produce things, they have to comply to US bans of selling technology to evil regimes like Iran and NoKo. The EU will comply to US bans, and by default the Russians will then sell some of their stuff, since they never were picky about their customers.
"China, which has a history of having little regard for either"
Why would any country not the USA care about American jobs or American national security? Trump has raged against Canadian dairy traiffs as unfair to American farmers - why would Canadians care more about American farmers than their own? Ditto with China. You only look after another country if it serves yourself.
The one major thing I've not seen any news network pick up regarding the agricultural output from the US is the food safety standards that the US flaunts. I've been led to believe over the years that the reason most countries slap such high tariffs on things like US dairy and meat is due to the stricter GMO rules other countries have that don't exist in the US. God help us in the UK if Brexit goes badly and we have to start importing more food from the US, as we'd have to weaken our food safety laws to let the stuff in.
God help us in the UK if Brexit goes badly and we have to start importing more food from the US, as we'd have to weaken our food safety laws to let the stuff in.
We already import lots of food from the US. Florida orange juice and California wine, to name but two I generally avoid in favour of alternatives from elsewhere.
The issue isn't how much we import, but whether we have a general trade agreement. If we do that, we'll have to accept US "red lines", that prevented proposed trade agreements with either the EU or Pacific Rim countries under Obama and Bush - back when the US at least believed in trade. That'll mean not just weakening food standards, but also any labelling (like "red tractor") that could be used as a proxy to discriminate against products like US growth-hormone-filled beef.
BTW, the scale of smuggling likely to follow that is why a trade agreement with the US must imply border controls for Ireland.
Why would any country not the USA care about American jobs...? You only look after another country if it serves yourself.
Have an upvote for fine rhetorical form. I suppose the rub is in getting countries to agree on what actually serve their own interests, especially from one regime to another. We go through an adjustment every four years in the US while other countries do so on a different schedule and under differing circumstances. Too, it's not like any country is particularly consistent as there are so many competing internal and external interests.
So ZTE is accused of violating US law. And that's coming from politicians, whether it's the President or the Congress!
Isn't that kind of political posturing the very reason we have supposedly-independent judiciaries? Does this mean they've abandoned any pretence of Justice?
Bah. Trump threatens to veto the bill if the amendment is not removed (if he doesn’t want the ban), and they will remove it in reconciliation. The senate knew they could pass it for political reasons without it ever going into effect.
As far as your other gripes: we don’t care how you trade or to whom, but you won’t be trading with us if you trade with nations that sponsor terrorism. And if you are putting tariffs on US products coming into your country, you can expect tariffs on your products coming into ours. If you have a problem with that, tough. You don’t have to trade with us.
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