I believe that this is the very first mention of unemployment in this thread, so I have no idea why you would make that statement.
It’s as if I said “I take it that you don’t want to talk about Trump suborning perjury with regards to his Russian business dealings” I would never say that to you, because it has not been mentioned, so why would I assume you don’t want to talk about it?
As to your second sentence - you have not convinced me that Trump will be responsible for making the economy of the USA better.
China’s economy probably can’t wait that long. They already had othereconomic issues before the trade war added yet another problem. Dragging out even the relatively limited trade war was presenting a real risk of recession. The potential of not making a deal and that trade war intensifying is also a real possibility that they had to consider.
Your presumption might be a little strong about what would come next. China really wasn’t a bad case for playing hard ball on trade (unlike say threatening to tear apart the world’s largest free trade agreement, NAFTA, as a negotiating tactic. :smack:) Unlike cherry-picking tiny areas in other trade agreements China had some major unfair practices like not respecting intellectual property rights and anti-competitive laws for foreign businesses in China. The EU even got on board to some extent last summer; they didn’t appreciate Trump going all Leeroyyyyyy Jenkins but generally are concerned about China’s trade practices. There’d be an incentive for the next President to finish the fight now that we started it. That next President might even be able to use more finesse and the worsening Chinese situation to really play hard ball.
Moving now rather than later is probably better for China. Whether this is actually a good offer is a different matter.
Because there is bi-partisan support for hammering China over it’s various, very serious actions. Really, their hope is Trump is pretty stupid and clueless, and his trade war is for all the wrong reasons. This is actually their best bet right now.
I do think that you are onto something, I would think that China has seen who has the ear of Trump and a promise to reduce the deficit (that is not really going to work much when you realize that there is really very little to guarantee that) was made to impress misguided fellows like Peter Navarro.
The take of that in funny video form from John Olliver’s Last Week Tonight:
China wants Trump as President, hence the trillion dollar offer. The payback for China is South-East Asia. Trump is weak on deterrence of China’s hegemony. Trump doesn’t play nice with America’s allies, and that’s good for America’s enemies.
Just what, exactly, is China supposed to be importing from us? Last I heard, sales of American agriculture to China was way down. What else do we have that they want?
Boeing wasn’t a target of the trade war to begin with, and China was already on track to buy something like $0.5 trillion worth of Boeing airliners over the next 20 years. If China is offering to import $1 trillion more stuff from the US, they’d have to buy more jets than they were planning to. What would they do with the additional jets? I don’t think they can afford to piss off the EU by canceling their Airbus orders either.
Mueller’s office disputes BuzzFeed report that Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress! I get it some will believe anything with zero proof. I guess this big news is just another example of fake news. The interesting thing is how quickly people believe it.
Is there any proof on collusion? We have spent a lot of time and money on the investigation. Trump has been with nothing.
Wouldn’t be good for them to piss off Airbus, as you point out, but if not switching their Airbus orders to Boeing, then I have no idea where they’re going to come up with $1 trillion in additional purchases from America from, unless they suddenly develop an enormous craving for Nebraskan soybeans.
Edit: Uh, yeah, I don’t think even a massive buy-up of American agricultural stuff would do the trick.
The Dow went up on Thursday after a rumor that the US was going to reduce its tariffs started circulating. They stayed up even when the administration disavowed the rumors.
Basically, the market just wants some sort of optimism on China. That the Dow went up today doesn’t mean that they legitimately think this will happen or that it’s an amazing deal, they just want the trade war to end. Trump could declare on Monday that we’re eliminating all the new tariffs with zero concessions and the market would still rise. Whatever gets us back to normal and a sense of stability.
I see you got so excited by a rare possibility that something bad about Trump wasn’t true that you forgot how to speak.
The problem is, Mueller was quite unspecific, and the original source made several claims, many unverified. The source stands by their reporting.
Of course, you’re repeating a talking point, not being interested in actual discussion. We have repeatedly shown tons of evidence of collusion, to the point that even Rudy Giuliani is now pulling back on the subject.
All sorts of stuff. Large aircraft or aircraft technology, agricultural machines, medical machines, you name it. China imports quite a lot from the US besides just produce. As to what they want, again, the list is huge. They are stealing a ton of intellectual property from the US from jet engine designs and materials to solar/wind technologies to network and IT stuff. Software, OS designs, hardware…they steal everything. Hell, a lot of their ‘new’ military hardware is designed and built on stuff they stole from us, from Russia, Japan, etc etc.
One big thing that they COULD import from the US (as well as other places) is more cars. The Chinese have a voracious appetite for cars, but they have limited imports (and basically what amounts to tariffs) to try and protect their local manufacturers (since a lot of the cars they build are crap). Same goes for other manufactured goods. Oh…movies. The Chinese only allow in 25 foreign movies a year (officially…they steal the rest of course).
Principally, I would question the source of this information. Unless it is from a Chinese source, the only group that would be able to leak something like this is the White House and any good news being leaked from the White House is more likely to be a thing that they want us to hear than it is a thing which someone took it upon themselves to leak to the press.
Trump needed to turn around his plunging popularity and the plunging DOW. It is at that moment that China decides it would like to bow to pressure and give Washington everything it wants?
The Chinese applied bonus tariffs and shipping slowdowns to the US, targeting products that would make Trump unpopular with his base so that he would have to give in. Xinping can make his people suffer as long as he so desires and they just all have to suck it up or get thrown in jail; he has a weaker lever to use against the US, but a massively greater ability to soak up damage.
But so, just as Trump’s popularity is declining with his base, the Chinese decide that their strategy for getting Trump to relent is useless?
Or, a crazy suggestion, Team Trump have lied to the press and the press has to eat it since if you get something from the horse’s mouth, you sort of have to run with it. It is, in theory, the only source with the actual information, so you’re kind of hard pressed to prove it wrong.
I do not believe that China has made this offer.
It is not impossible that I am wrong, but I would not make a $0.01 bet that the offer was real. There are better things to do with a penny.
There are multiple articles about this from multiple sites saying basically the same thing. It does not seem to be coming exclusively out of the Trump administration or from the White House. Basically, your post makes the assumption that China can just suck it up and it’s the US and Trump who is in trouble and desperate to change the narrative in order to prop up the stock market (which is itself silly, since if Trump made the whole thing up it would be, at best, a very temporary fix and once Beijing repudiated it the bottom would drop out). It’s a bad assumption. The US economy, despite this trade war, is essentially solid. The DOW? That’s a pretty outdated measurement of how things are going and is used, mainly, but the press since people THINK it’s important. China, on the other hand, is having some VERY rough issues across the board, and Xi is not in the best position to just wait it out. This offer is actually the starting place for negotiations…I’m fairly confident that if the Chinese ONLY had to pay a trillion for more US goodies they would count this a total win, especially if we back off on holding their feet to the fire on things like IP theft and WTO violations and the like. Trump is stupid enough to go for it, as it will give him a short term boost, domestically, but he’s not really stupid enough to make the whole thing up as you imply. No one is that stupid…even Trump, who is one of the stupidest presidents in history, if not one of the stupidest (and most ignorant) ruler in history.
I have not seen anything say that they have Chinese sources. The Financial Times (a British newspaper) has no coverage of the Chinese offer, it just notes that there was “a report in the US” that China was softening, and that raised the stock market. But no one told them about the offer, and they probably have more Chinese contacts than Bloomberg does. But they probably have fewer American contacts than Bloomberg does.
Do you think that we could find a Chinese news article saying that Xi Xinping has made an offer?
