It’s embarrassing how bad the US was made to look. And it was dangerous to have allowed China to win this round of the trade war.
The Financial Times (FT) noted that, “Unlike nearly 10 years ago, when Trump’s first trade offensive caught Beijing by surprise, this time a better prepared and economically more powerful China has been able to fight its once far mightier opponent to a standstill”.
This is why the FT quoted an analyst from the major French bank BNP Paribas, who said the United States has come to recognize “that it is now dealing with a peer rival capable of imposing material economic harm on it — a relatively new position for the US and a development which, at least to us, confirms China’s ascendancy to global economic superpower status ” (emphasis added).
The AP quoted an economist at Cornell University, Eswar Prasad, who commented, “It is hard to see what major gains the U.S. has made in the bilateral relationship relative to where things stood before Trump took office”.
In other words, Trump waged an aggressive trade war against China for months, only to end up back at square one, empty-handed.
I’m not sure if you meant this as a criticism. I think it’s downright damning how Trump proceeded with China. He basically got back to where we started with China- China buying soybeans again and selling us rare earth materials again. In the case of rare earths, China agreed to only one year of resumed sales. In other words, Trump really got nothing. The only positive I see is that the world now has finally woken up to the dangerous situation with rare earths we face with China controlling almost all the supply after processing. China showed their hand and the world took notice.
Not sure if in the above article but I read that it’s presumed China will limit sales so stockpiling REEs won’t be possible.
edit: If Trump lost the trade war and the US is back to where it was at the start of the year, I suppose one silver lining could be a stabilisation of its economy. Trump’s brash stupidity might actually help him.
The only thing stopping him from wearing a striped suit for 10 years is the supreme court that has been bought and sold.
The stench of the administration is mind-blowing. If (when) the economy sinks all this shit is going to rise to the surface with millions of super pissed off people.
If you check the US economic data it would be in recession already except for AI investment (Ai investment and data centres account for something like 800 billion of demand) . With bankruptcies , millions of unemployed and suddenly turned off investments you can not have a so called stabilisation. They can’t turn on the money printer this time as inflation is too high already and the debt too large. Investors will run for the hills en masse and data centre and all spending will plummet overnite.
As somebody who is from a country which has had multiple boom busts and no ability to turn on the money printer it’s a very ugly sight.
Sure the Fed will have to turn to quantative easiing when things go down but it will have a limit this time due to inflationary effects/bond market.
I hope I’m wrong and the mother of all busts doesn’t follow. But if we look back they do tend to follow new technology investment booms (industrial revolution, railroads, automobiles and radios, dot com). And we see the creaking signs in the employment market already.
Meh, there is damage which has been done. Countries that otherwise could have done less business with China have already started to replace US markets there and elsewhere. Even if the Supreme Court rules against his ability to set these tariffs, allies can’t trust the US under Trump. Canadian liquor stores may stock US booze again, but people won’t be rushing to buy it. Europeans will continue to holiday elsewhere. The future remains unstable for the American economy for the foreseeable future
Justice Amy Coney Barrett had pointed questions Wednesday about the law Donald Trump invoked to impose global tariffs, joining several other justices on the right and left in voicing skepticism about the president’s ability to use a tool he has deemed critical to carrying out his economic agenda.
Solicitor General John Sauer repeatedly argued during the lengthy 2½-hour oral arguments that the emergency law Trump used to enact the tariffs for nearly every U.S. trading partner contained language about regulating imports, which Sauer said included using tariffs. The relevant statute permits the president to “regulate … nullify [and] void … importation,” but it does not use the word “tariff.” Barrett pressed Sauer on this point.
“Can you point to any other place in the code or any other time in history where that phrase together, ‘regulate importation,’ has been used to confer tariff-imposing authority?” Barrett, a Trump appointee, asked.
Sauer noted one other trade law that had served as a precursor to the emergency law in question, but Barrett appeared unconvinced, repeating her question as Sauer failed to offer direct responses.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, interjected, asking Sauer to “just answer the justice’s question.”
Sotomayor at one point noted that no president has ever used the emergency law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose tariffs, though Sauer argued that President Richard Nixon’s tariffs were used that way even if the IEEPA did not exist at that stage.
“It’s a congressional power, not a presidential power to tax,” Sotomayor said. “And you want to say tariffs are not taxes. But that’s exactly what they are. They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue.”
The liberal justice noted that Congress has always used the phrase “regulate and tax” together, suggesting that the absence of any mention of tariffs or taxes in a law’s language was deliberate and that Congress purposely did not grant that power to the president.
I expect conservative justices like Barrett to stick to the text of the law but it’s encouraging to see liberal justices doing the same. Hope they keep it up when they’re back in the driver’s seat in the Supreme Court.
Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold. We shouldn’t be putting people on the court that share our policy preferences. We should be putting people on the court who want to apply the Constitution.
– Justice Amy Coney Barrett