US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days The impending disaster of trade-freezing tariffs on Chinese imports to the US has been averted, but like a Chinese cargo ship anchored off the coast of California, it's not gone entirely. Chinese and US officials issued a joint statement Monday morning informing the world that, despite mutually assured tariff threats as high …
IIRC, he, or one of his lackeys, claimed to have "saved" 250 million lives from the scourge of fentanyl. I never realised the addiction rate in the US was quite so high. Imagine the consequences if His Royal Highness Donald Trump had not done this! There would be abandoned cities across the wasteland of the USA. They'd be desperate for immigrants just to dig all the graves!
They did some really stupid maths based on the amount which they reckon had come in from China in the last year, divided that up into lethal-sized doses, and then claimed that that was the number of lives saved.
They were of course ignoring the fact that a) people who are addicted to this drug have multiple doses of it over time and 2. drug dealers would be insanely stupid to actively poison all of their clients with lethal doses because then they have no more clients, plus iii.) their issued figure of "lives saved" was more than the population of the USA.
...when the people who actually voted for him on the basis of that are faced with actually having the supply of cheap Chinese tat they've become addicted to for decades turned off.
People who are finding out that the prospect of having to put their money where their equally noisy and ignorant mouths are isn't as easy as their orange god told them it would be and might start turning against him if *they're* affected.
Trade wars aren't "easy to win" and the puffed-up Trump voter base gets upset and fold as soon as that becomes obvious and the consequences of his ill-planned-out BS might lose them their Christmas tat and/or jerbs?
Who could have predicted this? Well, anyone with half a brain. And China, who knew they could hold their breath longer than the easily-dissatisfied man-children of the other side.
(Not a fan of China either, but it says a lot that they come out of this looking better when they really shouldn't).
The "Atlantic" magazine has an article today "Chins called Trump's bluff" -- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/05/china-tariffs-trump/682776/ -- which ended with this statement "Trump is a classic bully who craves submission and fears conflict. His fervent supporters want him to be Michael Corleone, but he’s more like Biff Tannen. Standing up to Trump does not mean that you win. But giving in guarantees that you lose."
I couldn't express this better. He's thrashing around causing all sorts of problems but isn't actually achieving anything (apart from making us a global laughing stock, that is).
For what it's worth, it's already been confirmed by the writer himself that Biff Tannen- or at least, the future version of him in Back to the Future Part II- is based on Donald Trump.
I don't think that's entirely true. The writers agree that the character represents the same stereotype as Trump, but the reality is that Trump fits the stereotype of a narcissistic ill-informed blowhard bully as well as Biff does. I'm sure Trump's behavior helped sculpt the character, but does Biff really hang out with a Jeffrey Epstein character the way Trump did? Did Biff bankrupt his own casino the way Trump did?
So I reckon Biff is what Trump is aspiring to be, not what he is...
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In their defence, it was the post they were replying to that had already mistyped it as "BTTF III". And there's only a years' difference anyway.
But yes, the original comment made clear it was the second film (the one with "future Biff") that was being referred to, not the third (the wild west one).
Don't worry, they were spinning up the doublespeak saying it's patriotic to pay more and do without, and the idiots were failling all over it saying "stick it to China!"
Meanwhile they won't save their pennies to get their kids to learn Chinese to actually help the process of shifting manufacturing here (dirty woke colleges!) or get vaccinated against a 'CHINESE BIOWEAPON.'
Icon, because this is an era where the rational and half-witted need a few to tolerate the quarter-wits running everything.
You probably don't. All you'd get would be the usual goal-shifting apologists spouting disingenous rationalisations and gloatingly pretending they're winning the argument regardless of how badly they're losing.
It sounds like they should be fun to laugh and point at, but they get boring fast.
Who ever said that high tariffs, for 40 days, would be effective at bringing manufacturing back?
I believe those who said, and everyone else acknowledged, that high tariffs would have to be left in place for years to give companies the support they needed to build up manufacturing capacity. Most of the pushback came from things like chip or steel manufacturing, where they need many years, and additional years to pay off the cost of investment.
Tariffs are an economic tool, to be wielded by one skilled in the use of [such] tools.
Looks like Donald picked up the hammer, grinned like an idiot, aimed at the nail, looked at his thumb as he went to swing, and managed to smash his toe. He doesn't realize it yet, but. . .
There is zero certainty for business right now because the tariffs might go up again in 90 days. Or next week if Trump gets triggered by something China does, or because Laura Loomer tells him to.
Even if they reach a deal (and if they do anytime soon the only way that can happen is if the "deal" is almost exactly the same as how things were before) there is no guarantee Trump will stick to it. He could have a tantrum and undo it at any time. He did exactly that when he put tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and claimed they're "ripping us off". If they are it is solely his fault, since he took all the credit for the MCA trade deal in his term that replaced NAFTA (and was almost identical to it) in his first term.
No business can have any certainty until Trump is gone, or congress passes a law that takes away his "emergency" authority to unilaterally set tariffs.
I mean, would a US based business want to invest in something that depends on China right now? No, there's zero certainty and 30% is still really high. But would you want to invest in other countries? Same applies? Trump wants you to invest in the US, but why would you do that when it takes a long time and a lot of investment to set up production capacity here (when it is even possible) and your products will be more expensive. You'll be totally uncompetitive once Trump is gone and the tariff monster is back in its cage, you'll go bankrupt while your competitors who decided to hunker down and wait out the orange clown will be massively undercutting your prices by importing from China or Vietnam or whatever.
Those of us who are developers know about the "event horizon" where milestones are proposed that are near enough to sound convincing but yet far enough away that (hopefully) everyone will have forgotten about them by that time. Our work normally had to deal with a six week event horizon but obviously Trump works in 90 days. After all, who remembers when the latest TikToc clock runs out or even if its still ticking?
I suspect the negotiations in Switzerland went a bit like this"-
China: We think that you're screwed.
US: It seems so. We need to walk this nonsense back before the ordure really hits the air mover**. However, we can't actually cancel anything because our Dear Leader desperately needs a Win (and it would be More than our Jobs' Worth).
China: We could be nice and pretend that we've come to a temporary agreement which will lead to a permanent agreement in, say, 90 days by which time everyone will have moved on to some new crisis.
US: Lunch?
(**A hard milestone due in a couple of weeks caused by traffic volumes at west coast ports of both imports and exports falling by over a third. This which will have rather obvious effects on the economy as a whole.)
This isn't something like Tik Tok where most of us (anyone who isn't a creator with their income tied to that platform) don't pay enough attention to the extensions and don't care about the 90 day thing.
EVERYONE will know about the 90 day thing for China, and Trump desperately needs to be able to claim some sort of big win in a final agreement but Xi absolutely will not give him one. He could say "things are going well I'm extending it for another 90 days" but that just punts out the uncertainty and freezes investment in anything that depends on China in some way (which is pretty much everything, even building a new manufacturing plant in the US can't be done without a lot of stuff required to build it coming from China) so it is going to choke out the economy.
The stock market continues to whistle past the graveyard hoping everything will somehow turn out OK, but when the second quarter numbers start getting released in July we'll see how much it is impacting consumer spending and business confidence. It will be very hard for Trump to try to put a good face on that, or blame Biden.
Said this myself with respect to the semiconductor manufacturing the US allegedly wants to bring back.
When the cost of a single plant is literally several *billion* dollars, you need years of certainty to build your investment on.
Abandoning CHIPS- whatever one thinks of it- abruptly for utterly partisan, NIH reasons- because it came from the hated Biden government- makes clear they really don't understand, or rather don't care, about that.
There's not a chance in hell any of this will happen under the current chaos beyond a token or fake gesture (a la the Foxconn Wisconsin scam) intended purely to appease or curry favour in the short term.
Even if they know that Trump will back down anyway, they're not going to risk it.
"No business can have any certainty until Trump is gone, or congress passes a law that takes away his "emergency" authority to unilaterally set tariffs."
Is there not something in US law that says how long an "emergency" can last before Congress has to reign it in or agree to extend it? Shirley the President can't just unilaterally declare an "emergency" for as long as he like.
No, because most of the US Constitution and a lot of their laws relies on people in positions of authority behaving "honorably". Trump (both terms I and II) is the first President to disregard the conventions and norms of being President in favour of doing whatever the f&*% he wants and damn the repercussions.
In order to prevent anything like this from happening again Congress would need to pass loads of legislation limiting what the President can do, which would then of course need to be signed off by a President who agrees with it. This will never happen because neither party wants to limit what their party can do whenever they're in power because they'll want to be able to undo whatever the other side has done whenever they're in power. Plus no President will want to limit their own power so they'll never sign anything.
Trump reminds me of someone I used to work with. No matter how ignorant he was of something or how big of a mess he'd make, the world conspired to make sure, as far as he was concerned, everything came out OK.
A bit like Inspector Gadget.
"Experts have warned that tariffs and trade threats could put the US behind in the global AI arms race."
I actually wonder if, long term, that's an arms race that a country would want to win. If the bubble pops (and I don't profess to have any insight here!) then I can see there being a lot of hungry GPUs with nothing to do but warm the planet up or become obsolete.
And I can totally see Trump saying "well, I knew that would happen".
I'll be just as annoyed as I was when I was little and people would congratulate Gadget when it was Penny and the dog that really sorted everything. Boiled my piss, that did.
I'm still not sure I understand the reasoning behind the trade war.
If I buy something from China then as far as I'm concerned we've exchanged things of equal value: I sent money, they sent goods. If I didn't think that was the amount the goods were worth, I wouldn't have bought them. There's a net effect of zero in terms of my total wealth, I've just made concrete some of my otherwise-unassigned liquid value. I'm not poorer.
If China becomes richer then that's because it has found an effective way to add value; it has converted goods worth $x into goods worth $y while spending less than $y - $x. And if I've opted to buy their product then probably it means they've done a better job of adding value than anyone else. So my quality of life is improved compared to what it would have been if I couldn't buy from China, because I am able to get better value for my dollar.
So what I don't understand is: given that America has just 3.7% unemployment, what's the problem that needs to be addressed here? The government needs to make my life worse, ensuring I can get less for my money, so that some people who are already otherwise employed can instead work in factories?
I struggle to understand how that's a step up, for the specific people or for the country as a whole.
If this complete failure of comprehension reveals me to be a simpleton, so be it.
(As an aside: unemployment by the same measure was 6.7% during the pandemic but has a current-working-lifetime peak of 9.9% in 2009; other highs include 10.8% in 1982 and 24.9% in 1933. The only sustained period with lower unemployment than now was during WW2 when presumably a combination of the military and armament manufacture soaked up almost all available hands)
> So what I don't understand is: [..] what's the problem that needs to be addressed here?
The problem to be addressed is Donald Trump. Trump believes that business and trade are a zero sum game and that for him to win- and he has to- someone else has to lose.
I suppose some might call Trump's mindset "mercantilist" in effect. But that's almost certainly a coincidence.
Trump thinks that way not because of any thought-through connection to a particular ideology- don't make me laugh- but because he's a narcissistic bully. I'm not sure there's a lot more to it than that.
Also, there's an obligatory XKCD covering Trump's approach to tariffs now too. (Thank you to "Headley_Grange" for bringing this to my attention and for commenting on it further).
The reasons differ depending on whose reason you're thinking about. Trump's reason is because he is into mercantilism. That says that exporting is good because you get money from other people and thus have more money, and importing is bad because you give money to other people and thus have less money. It doesn't work because it fails to recognize that there's a lot of stuff with value that isn't money.
His supporters probably have a bunch of different reasons, and some of them like the mercantilism idea too. The other important one, though, is many people who have, either in reality or in their perceptions, lost a quality of life they once had or expected. People who expected that there would be easily-obtained and well-paid employment and found that these were not as simple as they expected are unhappy with their current situation. In some cases, that decline is real, whereas in others, they're actually able to obtain work that compares well in compensation and difficulty to their previous options, but they would prefer it to be easier and are under the misconception that it was better at some previous point. Various other factors, such as the increased prices of expensive things like houses and education have exacerbated this problem. Politicians, searching for a simpler explanation for this situation than the many realities of economic, technological, demographic, and geographic change, have decided that manufacturing in China is a convenient thing to blame it on, because it was at least part of the answer, so it can be stated as the whole answer. Therefore, anything you do that hurts China would have to be pushing the US back to the ideal times of the past where their lives would be better.
"Trump's reason is because he is into mercantilism. That says that exporting is good because you get money from other people and thus have more money, and importing is bad because you give money to other people and thus have less money."
Indeed, but the Most Stable Genius got even that wrong.
Mercantilism was about hoarding gold and silver as they represent international currency. Their was no fiat currency at that time so countries could not get out of the gold and silver standard.
But hoarding dollars is rather pointless as a reduction of dollar trade will simply lead to a substitution with other currencies.
Also, as gold and silver are hard limited, hoarding them will increase their value. Dollars are mostly virtual and their number can be grown and shrunk mostly at the Fed's will. Reducing trade and hoarding dollars will rather reduce their value.
As I said above, it's safe to assume that any resemblance of Trump's views to mercantilism (or to any other ideology he never studied or cared about) is purely coincidental.
If he believes that business and trade are a zero sum game where the other guy has to lose for him to win, that's purely a reflection of the fact that he is- and has always been- a sociopathic, narcissistic bully.
Correct.
But you Thomh, and John Doe and Joe Schmoe and Larry the Cableguy and Joe the Plumber etc, are not doing a significant amount of the buying from China. An item from China sent in a package to your house where it lives until it's buried in a landfill is not what international trade is all about.
International trade is about distribution companies acquiring boatloads of items from abroad. Trucked to warehouses. Sold to intermediaries. Trucked to other warehouses. Sold to retailers. Trucked to other warehouses. Etc. That's just the finished items. Commodities shipped in bulk and sold on to be assembled and/or processed and so on and so on. So many steps. AT EVERY STEP SOMEONE IN YOUR COUNTRY IS MAKING PROFIT. WHEN THE IMPORTS ARE IMPEDED ALL THAT PROFIT IS DAMAGED.
Jobs. Even if every single factory is "reshored", this isn't 1970 anymore. ALL THE JOBS PEOPLE ARE DREAMING ABOUT HAVE BEEN AUTOMATED IN THE LAST 50 YEARS. Where will the money even come from to set up any of that without all of that profit generated from all of those cheap imports.
Even if all those supposed jobs still existed and even if unemployment wasn't at historic lows and even if a labour shortage wasn't the real problem, WHO WOULD FILL ALL THESE FANTASY NEW JOBS WHEN THE PLAN IS ALSO TO DEPORT MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF CURRENT RESIDENTS.
It's all obviously a fool's errand to anyone who gives it half a minute of lucid thought. Interesting times indeed.
The underlying thought process..
> If I buy something from China then ... I sent money, they sent goods. (There's a net effect of zero in terms of my total wealth)
Money-in-money-out. Where does money come from? How do you get more? Most things things are, in the end, disposable - we buy them, use them, and they wear out and end up in the trash. The value of a product largely amounts to energy usage and minerals required to make a product. But: money comes from .... where? (If you're not manufacturing, you're not harnessing the energy or minerals, what are you doing to create money?)
(Are you able to take your old shirt and sell it to Mexico for equal wealth? You defined it as being of equal value. Just give it back to them, and get another shirt, later.)
The logical conclusion: Why not pay everything you have for a small item? Just describe that item as valuable, and you're not any less wealthy. But then, you need another item.. the money comes from where? Why don't you just "Make More Money"? (After all, you're getting something of value!) Why don't you trade that item back to the source country, for the same money, since it's valuable?
> So what I don't understand is: given that America has just 3.7% unemployment, what's the problem that needs to be addressed here?
Regardless of the United States' current wealth, there's a seen(imagined) absolute devaluation (loss of money) of the United States. The US is sending more money than it's creating. Everything from China that it re-sells, it sells to Americans; these items are taking money from a USian, and sending (part of) that money to China. These USians use the item and throw it away. (Dishwashers, cars, computers, toothbrushess, diapers, kids' toys, game consoles, shoes, ...) So, money comes from where? What happens when the US-ians have sent all their money to China? How do the USians take more items from China, or Mexico, or Canada - once they've spent all of their money? (Practically this won't happen in our lifetimes, and the US has great natural resources if it ever decides that it's vital to access them.)
This is a trade-imbalance, and it's what Donald is allegedly trying to fix. His method is generally: If you scream and yell loudly enough at your senior executives, they find a way to solve the problem (and behind your back, smooth over the effects of the tantrums) -- sometimes by the back-door, side deals, and perks to your vendors' reps.
--
The counter argument is that this is bullshit and the United States gets its wealth in other ways, and via other means - such as exporting tech services. While trade doesn't need to be equal between partners, trade does need to be (approximately) equal, on average, through all trade with everyone. If it's not, you're either growing or shrinking. Maybe it's cyclic, and averages out with time.
You're forgetting the intermediate steps here though which create wealth during the manufacturing process.
Let's take as an example a remote-controlled toy car. It's lifecycle looks roughly like this:
* A retailer in the USA of toys decides it wants a new remote control car for the Christmas 2025 season
* Around now (spring) in the year it'll approach toy wholesalers to get specs and prices, and to choose a wholesaler to provide it with the required quantity that it thinks it can sell
* The toy wholesaler will approach manufacturers in various countries to get quotes to manufacture the cars to their specs. They'll then choose a manufacturer and will place an order.
* That manufacturer will contact manufacturers of the components within the car to quote for the components they'll need for the cars they're making for various wholesalers - the more components they can share between cars the cheaper those cars will be overall, so the more profit they make.
* Component manufacturers contact raw material suppliers to supply what they need to make their components
Then over the next few months the goods are produced, until they are shipped to the USA in about August/September in time to be shipped to the wholesaler, who will then ship them to the logistics centre for the retailer, who will ship them to stores for sales to begin around Halloween.
That car contains (at a minimum) the following basic items:
* Battery (for the sake of argument let's say it's integrated)
* Battery charging circuit
* Motors (drive and steering)
* Control circuit
* Plastic body in several pieces
* Wiring
* Tyres
Now if you consider for the sake of the example that each step in this chain adds 5% to their quotes for their own profit then you can quickly see that most of the profit in making the item is realised overseas from the USA, however there is still some profit created in the USA from the truck drivers (or railroad) who move the cars from the dock to the wholesaler's warehouse, the wholesaler's profit, the truckers who move the goods from the wholesaler to the retailer, the drivers who move the goods from the retailer's warehouse to the stores, and the retailer's profit.
All of that is of course factored into the cost of the remote controlled car, however the value created there for the USA is that without the goods coming in from China you'd have fewer employed truck drivers, warehouse workers, shop workers etc, as well as people designing and commissioning these things to be made.
Its nothing to do about value, balance of trade or anything like that.
Trump wants to abolish income tax like it was around 1913 and instead get all government revenue via indirect taxation like sales taxes - and tariffs are just another form of sales tax.
Who benefits? why the mega rich of course! If you are earning say 50k verses 50m (in whatever currency), then a doubling of your cost of living hurts the 50k person a lot whilst it will still be small change to the 50m earning person.
The obvious point being, what happens when- hypothetically- they achieve their stated aim, everything is manufactured in the US and therefore no-one is paying those tariffs (i.e. taxes) any more?
Of course, we know that won't happen. But the fact that the whole we'll-fund-everything-via-backdoor-taxes-aka-tariffs model relies on that not happening in the first place shows how full of shit and/or incompetent they are.
tarriffs - in jest
becoming the next pope - in jest
trying ot get a third term - in jest
ending the war in russia-ukraine - in jest
WTF have we got 4 more years of jesting around ? a class A clown
He, like the muskovite, moves markets on stuff he says or does and I do wonder if jesting around has earned him or some one he knows a large wedge of money to fund his personal debts or probably fortune now. People might perceive him as a dimwit fool but there might be something lingering on the rear (not his smelly fat arse). I can hear it now "I'm not as smart as you think", erm no "I meant dumb as you think" ? In fact the nest comedy duo act, orange clown and the muskovite.
He's playing the caravel clown shell game with peoples money.
"Step right up, step right up! Which door is your money behind this time... think you got what it takes to not lose your money? I'll tell you what I'm going to do... give me a dollar to start with, and I'll double your money if you win. Which door will it be?"
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/ultimate-bait-switch-trump-tariffs-173500431.html
If you’ve ever watched a game of three-card monte, you’ve noticed that the dealer talks nonstop. The chatter serves two functions. First, it distracts the victims. Second, and maybe more important, the dealer is deceiving his victims about what’s befalling them. The spiel invites them to imagine they’re playing a game in which they stand a fair chance. In reality, they are being swindled.
The Trump White House’s press releases about its so-called trade agreements and negotiations—first with the United Kingdom, now with China—are just so much dealer patter.
The tariff numbers go up. Up and up and up. Ooh, now they come down. Up! Down! And all the while, everybody involved is telling contradictory stories about what’s being done and why...
China continues hell for leather to aim for 100% self-reliance.
The American consumer continues buying tat.
Overseas sellers load up the next three months' shipments to the USA with the equivalent of the usual 6-months' worth. Including Christmas tinsel.
Did I just wake up from a bad dream?
And that's actually a problem which will lead to nobody in the US saving money. Shipping companies are going to be charging king's rates for those 90 days because everyone knows they have to get their goods out in the window or risk getting blocked by tariffs again.
