1w ago

Reading the Trade War Tea Leaves

I just posted the below as a comment but I figured I'd start a thread, too, because I'm curious and I feel like a week of obsessive news reading hasn't really shed any clarity on anything.

Now that China has refused to back down from Trump's escalation, I'm wondering how Trump is going to wiggle out of this one. He can announce a 90 day pause with some lie about how China begged him to come to the table to save face domestically, but that maneuver might not actually bring China to negotiations. China seems to be in "never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake" mode and I don't see them responding to something like a temporary pause.

The pro tariff crowd seems to be thinking that China will go into a recession before the US does, so the US will win the game of chicken, but China probably has more options for responding to a recession, especially given the fact that the government isn't a bunch of idiotic, bumbling aristocrats and the flight from the US bond market has continued. No one is going to want to lend us the money it'll take to weather a serious downturn given the fact that we're run by crazy people.

So, assuming Trump is made to see the warning lights again, what does he ask for? He has jiu-jitsu'd himself into a no-win position because reshoring all of the manufacturing that left four decades ago is a nonstarter. I guess he could demand that China agrees to import a certain amount of US goods to lower the trade deficit, but they made that offer last time and then immediately ignored it because why wouldn't they? It's unenforceable because any retaliatory action the US could take brings us right back here. So what is a non-idiotic offer to China to get talks started? What will their opening demands be?

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China makes stuff, the US does not make stuff. It seems pretty obvious who'll be hurt more by this tariff shit.
They should make us cede some important port cities by unequal treaty. Take LA and make it good instead of bad.
- Renaming LA New Hong Kong and turning it into a high tech megacity while the rest of the US crumbles would be kinda entertaining.

Lemme get my armchair. I think Trump's number one mistake was fucking with China. America can bully weaker nations like Canada or Greenland no problem. And if they want to do that, there's little the rest of the world is going to do about it, for various reasons. But China?
One has to assume there are people in positions of power who truly buy into the propaganda of American exceptionalism or, more likely, they´re either true believers or so closely tied to Trump that they can be nothing more than yes-men.
Either way. If China wanted to, they could fuck up America's shit hard. They could make 2008 look like a happy memory.
Now you're gonna say, "But China would suffer too." True but the U.S. is already a deeply divided nation. If Trump fucks with the money, even his supposed "allies" on the right will start putting a target on his back. Simply put, China can point to the U.S. as the enemy and use that to further unite its population. Meanwhile, outside of MAGA circles, no one's going to buy into the narrative in America that this is Chinas fault. And even among right-wingers, the smarter ones will see that Trump is fucking things up for everyone.
It’s almost funny Trump probably could annex Greenland without much trouble. But fucking with China? You don’t fuck with the money, Donnie.
- I guess one path out of this is Acting President Vance sweatily walking back his "peasants" comment as Trump winds up in the hospital suffering from a mysterious heart condition, but the money people seem to be comfortable profiting from the chaos for the moment.
  
  I guess one path out of this is Acting President Vance sweatily walking back his "peasants" comment
  He would never do that. Americans already believe that Chinese people are subhuman, unthinking communist masses. Also people like Vance of have no concept of humility, only a smug superiority complex.
- China can point to the U.S. as the enemy and use that to further unite its population.
  It's not even just the Chinese population. The US is becoming very unpopular here in Europe. Anti US feeling used to be quite fringe but is now mainstream and suddenly China isn't the bogeyman it was.
  
  Yeah lol seeing the social media campaigns to "buy Canadian" or "Buy European" is some choice irony.

If I’m baselessly speculating, I’d guess we’ll see some threats of that “90 day pause” being unpaused unless countries agree to cut off or limit trade with China.
- shit that makes me doomer hard
  
  Why? As servile as vassals are,nuking your economy to obey an US order just won't fly anymore
  America is overstretched fighting wars all over the world,if anything,this is the time where you can possibly bite the bullet and tell them to fuck off after they demand too much
- I dunno, that seems a little like asking them to climb aboard sinking ship at this point. I think one reason everyone besides China was so quick to negotiate was they figured the tariffs were mostly theatrics and there would be an easy out. The less likely that outcome seems, the harder it might be to get other countries on board.
- I dont think most would, Canadá and México would because we are satellites but i dont see the rest of the triad (EU & Japan-S. Korea) do it since they want to be in the chinese market via OBOR or China could just sweeten a deal with them

I see the only way for Drumpf is a hot war. Make Taiwan a new Ukraine.
- If anyone was gonna just pull the trigger and set fire to an otherwise delicate geopolitical situation, it would be Trump
  
  I think it's going to be Iran or some other non-nuclear power though.
  He'll probably keep trying to use these politico-economic tactics with China.

Wouldn't China just trade more with the rest of the world instead? Maybe they can gain more customers from those who have abandoned American products due to the tariff excitement.
- The thing about the American market is that it's large, fairly uniform, and pays in a universally accepted currency. It is replaceable (we're only 5% of the global population), but that'll take time, which is why China was probably content up until now to let nature take its course.

I don't really know what's going on either. I'm pretty sure that the actions of the US are being driven by individual motivations (ego, for-profit domestic market manipulations, racism) rather than the cold-blooded rationality of international relations ghouls. I'm pretty sure the people setting policy in China know what they're doing. So I think the best way to understand the situation is to figure out what the Chinese government is thinking. They bothered to do a reciprocal tariff, why?

None of that matters. He’s speedrunning to multipolarity because in the case of a peaceful (relatively) unipolar world, a country in a better position to dominate global trade becomes the new pole rather than having everything break down.
Doing tariffs on everyone then only on China but to the max forces everyone else to pick sides which creates a multipolar world. If he didn’t do tariffs there would just be a shift to China as the pole slow enough that every player including the us would realign themselves to keep trade going.
It’s not good, but it’s whats happening.
- He is still doing tariffs on everyone
  
  Much less of tariffs on everyone.
  A modest import tariff can actually encourage both nations to develop or have a bunch of other outcomes. A big ol tariff shuts down trade between two countries and requires that both develop trade relationships with other nations that make up for the missing goods.
  Both the us and China can get along without* each other, but it’s gonna make other countries have to develop to cover those gaps.
  If you’re about to buy a cell phone, get an iphone before they send production back to India. They had to move it from there back to China because the Indian facilities were too contaminated for electronics assembly yields at the microscopic scale apple was doing.

I think China is going to pull and Iran and just say screw trying to make a deal. They have a whole world to trade with and the Americans have no spending power, and their dollar will be more and more worth less.
The Democrats are fully on board the Red Scare train they've been doing it against Russia for a decade now. Jumping on the anti China bandwagon is easy for them. So I can see if China sees that even if they wait Cheeto out, the replacements are more than happy to continue the Red Scare treatment.
What will bring things back? American jealousy. China will be far ahead in energy efficiency and purchasing treat power per capita while America goes full "you'll own nothing as a service." Which itself will collapse because of rapid enshittification.
The rest of the world will trade with China and BRICS. America will fade as THE country to look up to.

I sure wish I was financially literate enough to understand how to protect myself from the accelerating collapse. I've squirreled away every dollar from my receptionist gig I could to try and buy a house of my own one day. It's still in cash because stocks always intimidated me. I have no idea if investing in SHCOMP would protect me since it's still traded in dollars. I'm also afraid it's going to end up with a unilateral decision by the federal government that US citizens aren't allowed to own Chinese shit and I'd end up losing everything. I'm halfway to just buying a bunch of fucking gold, and I always thought gold people were morons.
- I have no idea if financial literacy would even help. I've been trying to find opinions on what to do and people who seem to have financial bona fides have variously said:
  Include some gold as a hedge
  Don't buy gold, there was a bubble and the price might collapse again
  If you must have gold, buy bullion rather than paper gold (and bury in the back yard, I guess? Keep it in the goblin bank?)
  Divest from American stocks and buy international equities
  Don't do that, the historical returns have been much lower and you'll miss out on a lot of growth (nobody seems to quote the adage that past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but nobody can predict the future)
  Just buy a target date fund
  Don't buy a target date fund, the returns are much lower than just buying equities.
  The most levelheaded-seeming opinion on what's happening right now noted that bond rates are higher than they've been recently, but they aren't unreasonably high given our current level of inflation and what's happening right now might just be a reversion to historical rates, which have been a lot higher before without the wheels falling off the American economy, so all the bond market reportage might be scaremongering. So who knows, maybe the American economy can weather this storm, too, even though from an objective perspective the stock market seems to be run by shrieking gibbons with the attention spans of houseflies. I guess I'm going to shop around for funds that have a low management fee and seem to do well relative to the S&P while having a bit more international exposure and assume that if the government ever decides it's illegal to own it and steals all my investments, there's probably worse shit going on.

The US will always have a trade deficit because the people there consume so much stuff.

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