Neo-people sense imminent rout underway, as indicated by the worried but whistling suspect MSM NYT
That ...
1. Schumer is correct, Huawei leverage-bluff called, and team USA realization of truth w/r to politely unmentioned rare earths (industrial vitamins) cardiac arrest trumps any Huawei ban, especially as we of the thread have news flow that team Huawei shall go completely hardware / software independent of team USA in a bit more than 16-months time
2. Team USA is about to sell teams Canada, Poland, Australia and New Zealand down the river, and push team Japan under the bus. Suggest Canada release kidnap victim / political prisoner Mdm Meng ASAP.
3. The trade truth, even once leading to trade peace, would remain a trade truth, and the Cold War ii go quiet for the moment,
- Ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers in America still need to do what they need to do, just as the Jews did or should have done circa 193X (I figure X = 2 or 3, not 8, but also not earlier than 1)
- Europe and China shall engage, because it is in Europe’s interest not to be bum-rushed into Cold War ii Willy-by-the-Nillly against team Russia and China, and Germany & France must continue to engage with European army, to guard against Russia (which NATO already does, so that ain’t the beef), against China (giggle, yeah, right) and I believe they had mentioned a third country - oh, yeah, wasn’t it Iran - my memory is deliberately faulty, to be more politic than France / Germany.
- In any case, am guessing that N.Korea shall not engage more closely w/ team Iran (Persia to the old schoolers) immediately, and situation stable for now.
- Turkey and Iran also stable.
- Saudi Arabia has got some thinking to do, as global energy equation continues to evolve.
- As long as above all true, Israel shall need to do what was being done, making friends, and playing nice, when can and still not absolutely have to.
- Hong Kong good for now, as usual, hyper ultra bullish, protected by 2M active people as opposed to ruled by declining family dynasty that at best is a public-toilet island state remaining unnamed, to be politic.
- Biotech park good, Greater Bay Area great, slowdown in land released better, and inbound immigration from anywhere fantastic. All good, including today’s demonstration and counter demonstration, to show that ostensibly messy Hong Kong is absolutely not indubitably garden Singapore.
- Continuing HKD:USD hard-lock should be excellent for Kyle, as a lesson in pegging etiquette.
- We can get on w/ the currency war now, and the average capital flight fellow must be more wary of New York, and less of Hong Kong
4. We get more time to prepare for inevitable 2026 and ready for inexorable 2032
Bottom line, all going about as expected, especially looks like we can count on a Trump win 2020, for finer milling of time but w/ benefit of hilarities (the debates have been better than most comedy skits) for the people by the people against other people, as the trump plays w/ Neo-people, but more importantly, ...
The ‘cleaving’ of the universe into two parallel spaces continue apace, allowing macro arbitrage and ensuring gold consolation-win. Perhaps at some juncture platinum gets tee-ed up as a strategic ‘American space-force’ metal and as ‘China electric vehicle element’, which may require team South Africa to fail, neither out of the equation of possibilities as team CIA ruminates.
In the meantime low-end Chinese factories go across the planet, and high-end incubates in Greater Bay, in part, and both groups should favor freedom-island HK as home base, now that all know Hk is in very good 4M hands.
Not.priced-in.
nytimes.com
A China-U.S. Trade Truce Could Enshrine a Global Economic Shift
By Keith Bradsher
June 29, 2019
news analysis
President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, meeting on Saturday in Osaka, Japan.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, meeting on Saturday in Osaka, Japan.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
OSAKA, Japan — The spin from President Trump and China’s propaganda machines on Saturday portrayed a truce in a trade war that has shaken economies and markets around the world. Tariffs won’t rise further, at least not yet. And the United States will loosen its potentially devastating punishments against Huawei, China’s most successful multinational company.
Yet the outlines of the tentative peace accord President Trump reached on Saturday with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, could further cement a broad reshuffling of the global economic order that undermines China’s decades-long role as the world’s factory floor.
The details of the discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, still are not clear. The two sides have agreed to resume talks, but the ultimate results are not guaranteed. Their differences could still derail a fragile peace in an economic conflict that has thrown a shadow over the outlook for global growth.
Even a fragile truce could have lingering implications. The United States would keep in place broad tariffs on Chinese goods for months or perhaps years to come. Global companies would almost certainly respond by continuing to shift at least the final stages of their supply chains out of China.
“As long as the threat is out there, there are risks in depending on these long supply chains,” said Jacques deLisle, director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. “Businesses don’t like uncertainty, and this prolongs the uncertainty.”
In that regard, the results of the Osaka talks are similar to those when Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi met in Buenos Aires on Dec. 1, resulting in a truce that left in place higher American tariffs on Chinese-made goods. That truce lasted until May, when the Trump administration accused China of backtracking on a partially completed agreement that would have replaced tariffs with broad structural changes in the Chinese economy.
Leaving tariffs in place for the indefinite future has long been seen as the second-best solution by both sides. The Americans want fundamental economic policy changes in China, where the government heavily subsidizes local rivals to American companies.
Beijing officials want the tariffs dropped entirely. But they refuse to overhaul an economic model based on industrial subsidies and state-owned enterprises that they see as successful in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past four decades.
For China, the Osaka talks represent a short-term success. Mr. Trump postponed new tariffs on roughly $300 billion a year in Chinese goods that he had threatened to impose at some unspecified date if Beijing did not come back to the negotiating table. He also said he would weaken limits his administration had imposed on the American technology that Huawei could use, without offering specifics. Those limits cut off the Chinese telecom equipment giant from the semiconductors and other technologies it needs, a shopping list that the company has said totals $11 billion annually.
Perhaps most important, China has persuaded the United States to return to the bargaining table without agreeing to any of the legislative changes that the Trump administration saw as essential, but which Beijing regarded as an affront.
“China will not concede its sovereignty and show weakness,” said Zhu Ning, a prominent economics professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
But an accord does little to reduce the trade barriers Mr. Trump has already erected. Last summer he put 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion a year in Chinese imports in crucial industries like car-making and the manufacturing of parts for nuclear reactors. Then he put 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of a broader array of Chinese imports. In May, he raised tariffs on that latter set of goods to 25 percent.
An advertisement for Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment giant, in Shanghai.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
An advertisement for Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment giant, in Shanghai.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
In response, an array of companies, from shoemakers to electronics manufacturers, are moving their supply chains out of China. Many companies have been shifting that final assembly to Vietnam, producing a surge in American imports from Vietnam this year even as American imports from China have begun to falter.
“What this has shown is there is massive uncertainty, and we’re not going to go back to the way things were,” said Wendy Cutler, a former American trade official who is now a vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
This shift will not happen overnight. China remains a manufacturing colossus with vast supply chains and a skilled labor force. Even those companies that continue to move final production out of China are continuing to buy Chinese-made components, particularly in electronics, a sector that China dominates. Despite the worsening trade tensions of recent weeks, Apple is planning to move production of a line of powerful personal computers to China from the United States.
“Uprooting an entire supply chain is a nightmare task,” said Jon Cowley, an attorney in the Hong Kong office of Baker McKenzie, a global law firm, who advises corporate clients on tariffs and supply chains. “It takes years, if not decades.”
President Trump warned this past week that he was concerned about the influx of goods from Vietnam. The surge could invite scrutiny from the Trump administration if it believes that companies are pretending to make products outside China but are simply clipping together Chinese-made parts.
Still, China has few options to stop those shifts. Trade between the two countries is so lopsided that China has many fewer American imports to tax. It could slam American companies that sell vast amounts of products in China, like Apple or General Motors, but pinching those companies could hurt the Chinese workers who make those products.
Its strategy so far has been to target agricultural goods from states that Mr. Trump would need to win if he hopes to be re-elected in 2020. The strategy has worked. American farmers have suffered from a loss of sales to China and have been urging the White House to resolve the trade war. To help cushion the blow, Mr. Trump rolled out two rounds of financial support to help subsidize the farmers. But China’s dangling of agricultural purchases in front of Mr. Trump appeared to once again persuade the president to back off from his bigger threat, saying farmers “are going to be a tremendous beneficiary.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump said China had agreed to resume purchasing some of the farm goods and other products that it has not been buying lately in retaliation for the American tariffs. “China is going to be buying a tremendous amount of food and agricultural product and they’re going to start that very soon, almost immediately,” Mr. Trump said in remarks in Osaka. “We’re going to give them lists of things we would like them to buy.”
Mr. Trump’s position could change if the American economy slows or if financial markets take a hit. While the trade war may be popular among Mr. Trump’s base and in some parts of manufacturing swing states, and resumed farm purchases could improve its image, it is disliked by the electorate at large.
Even then, leaders from both major American parties have indicated that the United States could continue to take a tough line on China no matter who is in the White House. The attitudes toward Huawei, in particular, show an appetite on both sides of the aisle for taking a tough line. Mr. Trump on Saturday said he would allow American companies greater leeway in selling their products to the Chinese telecom giant. His comments provided little clarity on which companies might be able to resume sales. The technology industry has argued that it should be able to sell products to Huawei that do not pose a threat to national security.
Those comments were already drawing skepticism on Saturday. In a statement, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, called Huawei “one of few potent levers we have to make China play fair on trade.
“If President Trump backs off, as it appears he is doing, it will dramatically undercut our ability to change China’s unfair trade practices,” he said.
American officials have portrayed Huawei to United States allies as a potential security threat, in an effort to get them to turn elsewhere for advanced telecommunications equipment. Huawei has denied that it represents a security threat to any company.
“Even if they try to thread the needle here on how they implement whatever Trump has decided, his message alone seriously undercuts the efforts put in to try and persuade our allies to join us,” said Laura Rosenberger, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a think tank.
Keith Bradsher started covering Sino-American trade relations in 1991 while in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. He is now the Shanghai bureau chief. Follow him on Twitter: @KeithBradsher.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting from Brussels and Paul Mozur from Shanghai.
A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2019 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Trade Truce Could Unseat China as World’s Factory Floor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe |
