China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke' China is upping tariffs on US imports to 125 percent, branding the Trump administration's tax policies a "joke." The retaliatory action comes days after the US government elevated levies against its arch enemy to 145 percent, claiming Beijing had shown "little respect" by hiking its tariffs to 84 percent, which was itself in …
Also, what level of respect is shown by unilaterally imposing tariffs on another nation out of the blue for basically no reason at all?
Trump has shown absolutely no respect towards China, he didn't even bother with the pretence of negotiating with them first to try and get a better deal. And then HE has the audacity to demand respect from THEM?
It appears Trump has just exempted computers and mobile phones. Either he didn't consider the consequences or hadn't considered that China might not immediately fold. Not, of course, that he's backing down or that things aren't going entirely according to plan.
Although it does sound tempting, albeit kicking a man when he’s down, it’s not really in China’s interest to do so. They want to carry on selling products to the US, they would like to maintain the status quo, they have little incentive to be seen as disrupting this, better to be perceived as ‘the good guys’ and any and all issues; price rises etc. are down to the present incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So why the tit for tat tariff rises? To provoke Trump, make him raise the stakes, to make the inevitable back track even more humiliating.
Yes he has been played, by people much cleverer than he or his sycophantic advisers.
Once people started talking about dedollarization (not using the US dollar as the reserve currency for trade) and treasury notes started losing value), he had no choice
Contrary to what he's saying, countries around the world are trying to find alternatives to US trade.
Consumers are boycotting US goods. Once that extends to boycotting services as well, it's game over.
Interesting note - despite American buyers having to pay a 25% import tax on Canadian aluminium, they're still buying as of this week. They can't use the cheaper stuff for certain applications. And that's not going to change.
Comically, the US gov is framing this as a "Clarification of Exceptions", like it's our fault for failing to understand that this was what they meant in the first place, and it's definitely not the case that Mango Mussolini's making it all up as he goes along.
The most deadly thing in the government world is the concept, which always seems to be followed, that voters think they saw the government specify what they were going to do, and that it would be done. And that is where most of our troubles come from when governments are called successful because they have got the votes. But votes are based upon the government’s ignorance before it was elected.
Someone needed to stand up to Trump on the tariffs, and I love that it is our largest trading partner. Trump will either be forced to fold like a cheap suit or he'll stick it out until republicans in congress start seeing their re-election chances going up in smoke unless they act to stop him. There's no way China is going to blink first, and Xi isn't going to give Trump what he wants in doing/saying something that will allow Trump to claim he "won".
Trump has no idea what to do when someone stands up to his bullying. Hate that it is going to lead to a big recession that hurts a lot of people, but the MAGA idiots who keep supporting him no matter what nonsense he spews or insane things he does need something really bad to happen to the country and more importantly to them personally for them to realize and accept Trump has been conning them all along. You can tell children all you want not to touch a hot stove but if you keep jumping in to stop them there are some who just won't learn. For some of them need you to step back and let them be burned, so they have the scars to remember that lesson.
> . . . [H]e'll stick it out until republicans in congress start seeing their re-election chances going up in smoke. . .
Speaking of smoke, I'd say that we're one fire away from a Reichstag.
It *really*, no joke intended, does worry me as the parallels are too too similar !!!
I was watching an episode of 'World at War', yet again on PBS in the UK, and it was a step by step sequence of events that Trump was actually mirroring ... in almost the same sequence.
Trump is danerous and his supporters are dangerous because they are capable of being an uncontrolled mob (See 6th Jan !!!).
We all know where uncontrolled mobs lead ...
:)
"Xi isn't going to give Trump what he wants"
What is it the Americans want from China? That they go back to the poverty of the 1980s? That they go away altogether?
Not really something the Chinese would or could do in any circumstances.
The politicians in the US want the US to be the single most powerful nation on earth again, but without the hard work it took to get there.
The smart strategy would be to build a alliance against China. So that is out of the question.
The stupid thing to do is to fight everyone all at once so they will unite against you. Which is obviously what they choose to do.
PS
Reagan brought us the savings and loans crisis.
Clinton the dotcom bubble
Bush the lesser the financial 2008 meltdown
Trump is busy trying to bring down the global economy.
Is there a trend here?
>Is there a trend here?
Yup. My current theory is that the President of the USA, as an office, has significantly more power to do bad than it has power to do good. That's not a moral judgement, it's just a potential; an unchecked bad president can just do more damage than what an unchecked good president can fix.
Given that, and given that there is no political theory yet that can guarantee good leaders, currently I believe that unchecked executive power is, on average, a bad thing.
That is, the inherent slowness of a Parliament is a price worth paying, in order to make sure there is no way to very quickly fuck everything up. Because, if there is such a way, someone eventually will do it, and then it will take a whole streak of good luck to fix it.
So, if I were in the position to give advice, I would say: rein back executive power. In the specific USA case, I'd make it so that Executive Orders have to be ratified by Congress within some short time frame or they automatically expire, and I'd take away from the President the power to autonomously decide foreign policy. Yes, this would make the USA slower to react to sudden crises (though nowhere near as badly as it would've in the late 1700s). Yes, I believe this would, in the long run, prevent more damage than it causes. No, it wouldn't fix everything, there's a lot more that's broken. No, I've no idea how this could practically happen, given the political climate; I don't actually think it's feasible.
Currently, the only check to the power of the President appears to be the Supreme Court, but this leads to a lot of political action being taken by a judiciary body, which is quite bad.
The thing is that Trump likely doesn't have the power but is doing it anyway: he's claiming emergency powers in the apparent absence of an emergency. But he has the "Parliament" in his pocket: they could override him but they're egging him on. It's not simply a case of the executive going rogue, the elected representatives and the executive are conspiring to subvert the normal constitutional process in order to get change that would otherwise be impossible - and they're doing it openly. It's too late to fix the system - the system no longer exists.
"That is, the inherent slowness of a Parliament is a price worth paying, in order to make sure there is no way to very quickly fuck everything up. Because, if there is such a way, someone eventually will do it, and then it will take a whole streak of good luck to fix it.
Liz Truss? Although on the plus side, it's lot easier to get rid of a UK PM than a US El Presidente.
Is there a trend here?
Yes, the americans have for generations not trusted their politicians YET vote in people who are not up to the job or are stymied in their attempts by political opposition that does not care about 'the people' JUST the 'other' must fail because they are the 'other tribe'.
:)
"why have they chosen the greatest weevil twice?"
People who think they are at the bottom of the heap could think they might end up higher up in the heap if it was shaken up very thoroughly.
The Orange utan looks like a good candidate to shake up the heap. They might not appreciate the value of having a heap to be in. There is a probability that no heap might be left for them.
Generally, the answer is no. Most services or software are not counted even if you do pay across borders, and most of the time, payments for those services are made to the local version and not counted as exports in the first place. It's weird to try to figure out what counts as an import when the product was partially made anywhere they hired someone. Maybe Trump would be happier if they had tried to do so as it would make some of the US's trade deficits smaller as it is often a net exporter of services and intangible things, and you could easily define those flows as much larger than they are if you wanted the deficits to seem smaller or turn into surpluses.
I have a feeling someone is going to make a law attempting to define these things in order to put a tariff on services. The only question is whether it will be someone retaliating against the US's tariffs or the US themselves trying to exacerbate their own because they think that a high enough number will miraculously change reality to match what they want it to be.
"I have a feeling someone is going to make a law attempting to define these things in order to put a tariff on services."
The EU wants to include services in their tariff response. Trump didn't as that would lower the trade deficit considerably and thus reduce the "expected" tariff income.
I've said similar things myself in the past- services are a *very* convenient exclusion. You could put this down to Trump, who I suspect has a simplistic and old-fashioned understanding of trade purely in terms of physical items loaded onto ships and sold elsewhere.
But while he's surrounded by many more dogmatists and extremists this time round, there's no way they can be all sufficiently ignorant of the fact that the US- and its companies- have a disproportionately large share of the world market in high-value digital services. Nor of their value to the US economy. (*)
Regardless, it's certainly convenient for the US that they've framed their tariff wars purely in terms of physical goods, and have avoided including- and drawing attention to- something that (a) makes their alleged "trade deficit" case far weaker and (b) presents an obvious target for reprisal tariffs.
Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world isn't stupid. All's fair in love and trade wars and- as the US is finding out- its opponents aren't obligated to fight back in the same terms.
(*) Then again, given the clear return-America-to-its-1950s-manufacturing-oriented-glory thrust of the current campaign, it's quite possible that just doesn't register as relevant to that mindset. Or perhaps they still view companies like (e.g.) Facebook and Google as the enemy, supposed havens of the "liberal" and "woke" attitudes they've castigated them for. (Even though they're nothing of the sort and Facebook in particular has *never* been anything other than self-serving, with hollow or ineffectual token gestures intended solely to placate politicians and regulators, and which has always been happy to propagate the type of right-wing propaganda that increases engagement with their platform.)
I think the difficulty to calculate national value is a major part of it. When someone in Brazil buys a license for $software which was written by a company headquartered in the US, but the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes, and the programmers who wrote the thing were located in, in order of count, Canada, India, the US, Ukraine, and the UK, and there were translators from eighteen countries but the person who bought it is probably either using the Portuguese (translators in Brazil) or English (verified in Canada) version, and the team running the servers this connected to is located in the US and Australia, and the security people are in Germany, Canada and South Korea, then how much of the purchase price is an export from the US and an import to Brazil?
Nobody knows. Any attempt to make a formula would be debated forever, especially if any tariff was connected to it. Evaluating that formula would be time-intensive. I think that's why it gets left off a lot of calculations, and the people deciding what tariffs should be right now are not interested in trying to fix this. They do some random calculations and decide that is good enough. In many cases, nobody cares about the numbers even if you could calculate them. Meanwhile, calculating the value of exported and imported goods is comparatively easy because you just put all the numbers from the forms into a big spreadsheet.
What you say is to some extent true, though let's not forget that the manufacture and make-up of physical goods is often more complicated than it would first appear too.
However, when it comes to things like "the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes", this is an obvious- but currently tolerated- legal fiction.
If there was sufficient motivation, I've no doubt that legislation could and would be passed allowing regulators to effectively "pierce the corporate veil" and to decide which entity and/or country was the "true" owner or source for the purpose of situations like this.
"let's not forget that the manufacture and make-up of physical goods is often more complicated than it would first appear too."
Of course, and there are probably a lot of inaccurate parts of that calculation. It is relatively easy to do that calculation, however. A lot of metrics exist because they're easy to calculate. GDP is a prime example. Its creators said it was not the best metric, just a simple one that could provide some information, and yet it's been used for a long time precisely because it's not hard to calculate. A lot of other metrics have derived from GDP, not fixing any of its deficiencies, but trying to add or remove things so the numbers go in the direction the person changing it wants them to go. When given the choice between something useful that they might not be able to evaluate or something less useful that they can easily do, statisticians sometimes choose the latter and politicians nearly always prefer the latter.
"However, when it comes to things like 'the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes', this is an obvious- but currently tolerated- legal fiction."
Sort of, but again, there's a lot of complication to it. Let's say that our company is California-based Calsoft and it forms Hidesoft, a subsidiary in Ireland to store some programs it created beforehand. Meanwhile, it buys Irishsoft, a company that was founded in Ireland which wrote other software. What is the legal difference between these two companies? What makes an originally Irishsoft product different from one held by Hidesoft? If we say it's a simple layer that can be pierced by the US tax authorities, why can't they decide that all subsidiaries, no matter where they are based, are US corporations and subject to that tax, meaning that any company operating in a country can be taxed on global revenue from that country? That wouldn't make sense and would break a lot of things if tried. It would also mean that the two Irish companies would probably cease paying tax to Ireland because, according to the US, they're US companies now. Ireland wouldn't like that, so why don't they pierce the veil going the other way and deem Calsoft to be an Irish company, since it is clearly operating Irish companies. International tax law has a lot of loopholes, but they often exist because there is logic in the situation that originally created them.
What you say is to some extent true, though let's not forget that the manufacture and make-up of physical goods is often more complicated than it would first appear too.
True, however for physical goods it's easy to prove where they are. You can physically count how many widgets are in a container coming off of a ship at a port, or coming off of a plane at the cargo terminal., or how many tons of ore is being exported on a different ship etc. Counting units of software can be done by giving them a nonexistent physical equivalent in the jurisdiction of sale, but for most organisations these days that's the same jurisdiction as purchase so no tariffs would apply in that case.
"but the IP is owned by a subsidiary in Ireland for tax purposes, and the programmers who wrote the thing were located in, in order of count, Canada, India, the US, Ukraine, and the UK, and there were translators from eighteen countries but the person who bought it is probably either using the Portuguese (translators in Brazil) or English (verified in Canada) version, and the team running the servers this connected to is located in the US and Australia, and the security people are in Germany, Canada and South Korea, then how much of the purchase price is an export from the US and an import to Brazil?"
The current US administration has just discovered that the above applies the "Mad in America" cars too. And by association much of the worlds manufacturing and trade. Globalism might be a bad word in some quarters, but that's how the world works and any one country trying to disentangle itself from that web is going to have a very long, complicated and expensive job. There are NO quick fixes, as the US administration is now finding out. Their simplistic ideas are just that. Simplistic. A bit like the minds that came up with them..
At least with cars though you can put an import tariff on a brake block or an exhaust silencer (muffler for Americans) or a wiring loom, you can't easily put one on a translation script or a block of code which may have been written or re-written in several countries by several people.
The EU wants to include services in their tariff response. Trump didn't as that would lower the trade deficit considerably and thus reduce the "expected" tariff income."
I'm wondering what the UKs response is eventually going to be. After all, we have a trade deficit with the US so by Trumps own definition, the US are cheats, currency manipulators, not "playing fair" and they "owe" us for that deficit, So that should be a default 10% tariff on all US goods coming in, plus 25% on steel, aluminium and cars and probably another 15% or so "reciprocal tariffs" on everything else, all accumulative, of course :-)
>> You could put this down to Trump, who I suspect has a simplistic and old-fashioned understanding of trade purely in terms of physical items loaded onto ships and sold elsewhere.
Of course, cargo aircraft are now a thing, cutting out the need to call at a US port if you want to trade anywhere in the Americas. Goods that would normally be sent to the US, and from there, shipped elsewhere in the Americas, now are bypassing US ports and US tariffs.
China and Japan can ship goods to the Canadian port of Vancouver, or by air to Calgary international or Edmonton international, and then felt them out pretty much anywhere.
Europe? Ship to ports in Eastern and Central Canada, or fly in to Halifax, Montreal (Mirabel) or several international airports in Ontario.
Business hates uncertainty. Even if all tariffs were undone tomorrow, it's just too risky to deal with the US when you don't have to. Even a change in government isn't going to fix that. The trust is gone.
"You could put this down to Trump, who I suspect has a simplistic and old-fashioned understanding of trade purely in terms of physical items loaded onto ships and sold elsewhere."
Plenty of goods are assembled from modules built someplace else. China has been investing in large industrial estates in Mexico for Chinese companies to occupy. Semi-finished things can be sent and assembled/configured in Mexico for the US market and also other places in central and south America.
Hahah..
AWS and Microsoft will never charge customers from America, where the tax is higher when they can charge from a tax haven like Ireland or some island you never heard of.
What makes you think Microsoft and Amazon are loyal and try and pay tax in America ?
It's also why US based multi-nationals continue investing outside the USA. It's cheaper to spend and build in other countries than to bring the profits "home" and face US tax burdens. Every once in a while, the US tries a "tax amnesty" and it mostly fails because they are one offs.
tl;dr - Truss was got rid of because her own party saw her as a liability and *could* do so because the UK parliament works differently to the US presidential system. Trump, presumably, couldn't be got rid of like that, nor as quickly, even if the rest of his party wanted him gone.
The situations are somewhat different.
UK prime ministers are easier to replace- but only by their own party- because they're not directly elected by the public, but effectively chosen by MPs in parliament.
In practice this will, of course, be the leader of the winning party following a general election. But it also means that MPs- and, in turn, the party that controls them- can change the PM at any point if it suits them to do so.
Truss was a mid-term replacement who replaced Boris Johnson after just over 80,000 Conservative party members voted for her to become leader. She resigned and was replaced by Sunak after it was clear she'd lost the confidence of her party. (*)
But the US president is voted for separately- albeit via the electoral college rather than directly- and I would assume that he couldn't be got rid of in the same way, nor nearly as easily, even if his own people wanted him gone.
(*) Therefore, even if one considers a general election victory a de facto endorsement by the electorate of the winning party's leader, this doesn't apply to Truss. She neither gained nor lost her premiership following a general election.
"But the US president is voted for separately- albeit via the electoral college rather than directly- and I would assume that he couldn't be got rid of in the same way, nor nearly as easily, even if his own people wanted him gone."
But, if s/he loses the confidence and support of their own party, s/he can become a lame duck. Congress can vote to remove emergency powers and neuter executive orders. Although if this happened to Trump I suspect he would explode with rage and destroy everything he can just out of spite.
The US President (and vice) can be impeached, convicted and removed by Congress.
The House does the impeachment and needs a simple majority, then the Senate tries the impeachment, and needs a 2/3 majority to convict. It's a very high bar, IIRC only eight judges have ever been convicted.
The Republicans had two chances to convict DJT, McConnell refused both times - surprisingly he now acknowledges that was a mistake.
Right now, there may be a majority to impeach, but there almost certainly isn't the supermajority in the Senate to convict.
It's also unclear what actual enforcement might look like because a president has never been convicted. If he refused to leave, what powers of enforcement does Congress really have?
"It's also unclear what actual enforcement might look like because a president has never been convicted. If he refused to leave, what powers of enforcement does Congress really have?"
IIRC, the oath of office is to the Constitution. Likewise, the POTUS may be CiC of the military, but their oath is also to Constitution and country and then their superiors and the POTUS. If there;s a conflict, priority is Constitution, country and then superiors, giving the required "out" to disobey illegal orders, So it really depends on if the POTUS wants a civil war or not and which, if any, of the military would support him.
POTUS also swears to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", but I see a lot more undermining and little of the "preserve, protect" bits of that oath.
Trump May Blow Up U.S. Defense Sales to Europe
Trump "wants Europeans to spend more on defense, yet he is hammering their economies with tariffs. He wants to withdraw U.S. assets from Europe, yet he wants to take over Greenland. He wants Europeans to buy American weapons, yet he threatens to pull vital technical and logistical support to use those weapons."
“You cannot muse publicly that you may not sell advanced fighter jets to Europe because they might become enemies then express unhappiness when they suggest they might not buy arms from you.”
Strike while the iron is hot!
While Donald Trump is busy burning his bridges, the People's Republic of China is busy trying to (re) build them (Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ducks invitation to ‘hold hands’ with China on tariffs).
"you may not sell advanced fighter jets to Europe because they might become enemies"
The US selling/providing weapons is something I've always had an issue with. It two combatants can come up with naught but rocks and clubs, let them do that.
The US was sending Stinger missiles to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and did wind up facing the ones that were tucked away when they made the mistake of going in themselves. I would have said to let the Soviets "win" and then see what. It's like a dog that chases cars, what would they do if they caught one? When you enemy is in the process of screwing up, don't get in their way.
"I would have said to let the Soviets "win" and then see what. It's like a dog that chases cars, what would they do if they caught one?"
The Soviets caught quite a few countries. They had things to do with them. Those things weren't pleasant. You might be correct if you mean that they would fail to catch Afghanistan specifically, as in practice they lost a lot of lives and money that they could not replace by doing that, but if you really think that they wouldn't have found ways to abuse the people in and near Afghanistan if they had controlled it, history suggests they could find ways to do that. We don't even have to refer to all the examples of countries they ruled from Moscow or named a friendly dictator for. They gave us plenty of evidence in their years of partial rule what they liked doing.
That doesn't mean you're wrong about what should have been the response to that, but if you're using the logic I think you are, it's the wrong way to decide.
"You might be correct if you mean that they would fail to catch Afghanistan specifically,"
Yes, so many have tried and never cracked it. Other than poppy fields, what else is there that makes expending lots of lives and money worthwhile? It would have been easier and cheaper to invade via businesses and land purchases.
The highest thing Trump craves is "respect" - which for him means everyone calling him "the greatest".
So he decided to drop a bomb on every nation in the world to show them who is boss, with a threat that if they didn't kiss his ass, surrender themselves to being Trump's bitch, things will get a whole lot worse.
It has his MAGA base cheering and he really thinks this will make him a winner.
Thank fuck for China standing up to this tyranny, retaliating with 125% tariffs and proclaiming they are now out of this game of tit-for-tat nonsense. Trump is desperate for Xi to call him, but he's not going to. He has taken his phone off the hook, is simply letting Trump stew, getting increasingly annoyed with being ignored, while destroying America more than he's harming China.
That is how you fight terrorism.
"He wants them to kiss his *"
Pedro X Molina has a nice perspective on that.
Drawing might not be SFW, depending on where you work.
The drawing is inaccurate - Trump isn't wearing his adult diaper.
We found out during his trial that he has "problems" , and being forced to sit for hours in a courtroom, the air around him smelled of shit.
Same as we saw his white have shoulder pads that would put Joan Crawford to shame when he slumped over half asleep.
Or the 2" lifts in his shoes ( he fell out of his shoes when secret service agents rushed him offstage when a bullet grazed his ear).
If Canada has any brains, we'll let the current free trade deal expire, and just make one between Canada and Mexico. We can trade under WTO rules with the US, or sector by sector, like we used to.
We trade just fine with the rest of the world without needing free trade deals.
Of course, if we had brains, we'd join the EU.
"That is how you fight terrorism."
I'd replace terrorism with "bullies". Trump is using bully tactics to get his own way and until/unless he's effectively slapped down by the rest of US government, China needs to keep bopping him on the nose.
ALl this respect etc thing is a distraction. LOok at how many are talking abiout here, instead of actually measuring what is really happening.
Trump only cares about money, and he is clearly making money from insider trading with all these swings.
Thats what you can measure and thats what actually counts. WHen this all ends, Trump and his mates will walk away with B more... you cant walk away with more or less i am the greatest.
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The Whinners: Apple, Nvidia Score Relief From US Tariffs With Exemptions
This is going to be the start of the backdown. I am going to suspect all Chinese made brands by American companies will get exemptions. Clothes, medicine/drugs, game consoles, toys, car parts, ships/warships, etc. Anything that will not upset the American voters will make it to this exemption list.
The Winners: The White House is "waiting" (some publications use the word "begging") for Xi to call (Trump is waiting for Xi to call. The Chinese see it differently).
Donald may be "keeping his cards close to his chest" but he's also playing with his cards facing Xi.
"Anything that will not upset the American voters will make it to this exemption list."
Xi may not want to play the game with an "exemption list" wildcard and might just continue with massive tariffs on US imports until a negotiated trade agreement is worked out that's agreeable to both sides. How long will US industries be able to hold out if they had been exporting to China and companies that were importing raw materials that are now severely limited? China could have their own exemption list where RE metals won't be sold to US firms except those with a certified/verified use in medical equipment, as an example.
"China could have their own exemption list where RE metals won't be sold to US firms except those with a certified/verified use in medical equipment, as an example."
The Rare Earth metals restrictions from China is actually more concerning than every other response of theirs. They've put export capacity limits on them, not just restrictions or export tariffs for the US. The rest of the world is also being held to ransom over those products. They may be concerned about "loop holes" whereby 3rd countries by then sell on to the USA, but the artificial restriction just mean everyone will be bidding up the prices on smaller slices of the pie.
"They may be concerned about "loop holes" whereby 3rd countries by then sell on to the USA, but the artificial restriction just mean everyone will be bidding up the prices on smaller slices of the pie."
The 3rd party roundabout isn't that big of a concern. What's more important is that US companies that rely on supplies from China could wind up shutting down leaving a hole in US domestic production. When things get evened out again, there will be Chinese manufacturers lined up to fulfill demand for those products with no domestic US competition and less of a chance a US company could be formed to make those products again. Especially if the company that shut down took a bunch of patents with them so there's no way to legally produce the goods by a new firm until the patents run out (too much risk).
Either that's some craven pandering and capitulation to the same tech companies Trump boasted he was going to make bring their manufacturing back to the US.
Or he's afraid of upsetting the all-mouth-and-no-trousers MAGA crowd who were so tough and didn't care how ill-planned all this was.
At least, until it came to facing the real-life consequences and the prospect of having to make actual sacrifices to back that up, such as paying through the nose for their tech toys?
(Expect more capitulation as the people who, for all their flag waving, when push came to shove repeatedly chose cheap imported shit over more expensive US-manufactured goods now face the prospect of having that stream of cheap shit turned off).
"Donald may be "keeping his cards close to his chest" but he's also playing with his cards facing Xi."
Yes, it certainly puts the lie to the "worlds greatest" dealmaker, the supposed author of "The Art Of The Deal", when his deals involve him giving away his "secrets" up front. See also his "peace deal" for Ukraine where he went in publicly accepting Putins demands before they even started negotiating. No wonder his casino(s) went bust.
From my perspective this is turning out to be quite a good thing and pushing people in the right direction. People are arguing against tariffs! People are now parroting how tariffs are a tax on the country importing and makes the country poorer! If they make that next step of thinking about it and believing it the world could be shocked with more trade and richer people!
And of course we can watch what happens because of tariffs in real time! As for the Chinese and Americans, sorry you guys are going though this
I'm surprised that the Reg didn't take this opportunity to have a more detailed list of the updates to the updates on the bottom of all these articles. I think it would highlight how much it changes, but I don't blame anyone not wanting to be responsible for keeping up with it all!
America needs to learn from their personality cult society where they think that leadership are their benefactors.
America needs to abolish the current position of President, its potential for chaos is nothing more than a termporary dictatorship until the next election.
The genius of the westminster system is the Prime Minister can and often loses their position at any time and ogften for good reason.
Thats why Australia is peaceful no guns and everthing is far more moderate instead of the extremes we see in America.
