US President Donald Trump has threatened China with a 104 per cent tariff, if Beijing doesn’t drop its 34 per cent tariff on US goods.
President Trump announced the plan on social media, as stock markets across the world continued to plummet.
What’s next?
Beijing has not yet commented on the president’s threat.
Trump can raise them to 1000% and China won’t care too much. It will hurt, sure, but China has all the cards. They’ve been preparing for this since Trump v1.0 and know exactly where to hit the US. And they have already proceeded with a surgical strike you don’t read much about. It’s not a tariff increase, it’s more a bureaucratic measure. They sent all US buyers of certain rare earth metals required for high tech electronics to the back of the queue of buyers. Not an outright block, just “extra investigation” required before rubber-stamping the export, indefinitely if need be.
Yeah there is no doubt that any serious intelligence service will have been all over Trump and anybody connected to him from 2020 onwards. Inviting randoms into signal groups, leaving classified documents piled up out in the open, are very public evidence of what will have been rampant private weakness, that will have been exploited everywhere, by everyone. And so yes the likes of China will have known exactly what was coming in Trump 2 as soon as these plans were formed. Probably before Trump did.
I don’t recall exactly the year but there was a commerce problem between Japan and either France or Germany in the 80s. Japan didn’t want European cars in their market so made up a special inspection of engines for foreign cars. So the other side picked the best selling export I think Nagasaki bikes, and made up some special inspection as well. They ended up both allowing the free sale of both vehicles
Everyone has magic and Pokémon cards it seems.