Is the US-China Tariff war winding down?

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

US-China close to cease fire in tariff war?

Have you seen this yet?

Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software
Communist party directive aims to boost domestic tech supply chain

Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft.

The directive is the first publicly known instruction with specific targets given to Chinese buyers to switch to domestic technology vendors, and echoes efforts by the Trump administration to curb the use of Chinese technology in the US and its allies.

The move is part of a broader campaign to increase China’s reliance on home-made technologies, and is likely to fuel concerns of “decoupling”, with supply chains between the US and China being severed.

Earlier this year, Washington banned US companies from doing business with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei, and is looking at ways to help funnel money to its European rivals.

The US recently proposed that technology sales into the US from “foreign adversaries” would be vetted for national security reasons, and has been pressuring European allies to freeze Huawei out of 5G infrastructure projects.
etc.

https://www.ft.com/content/b55fc6ee-178 ... 03645ac406

or google "ft foreign beijing pc". First hit on my FF browser.

It looks the trade war is alive and kicking to me.

Matt

[odysseus2000]

US-China close to cease fire in tariff war?

Have you seen this yet?

Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software
Communist party directive aims to boost domestic tech supply chain

Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft.

The directive is the first publicly known instruction with specific targets given to Chinese buyers to switch to domestic technology vendors, and echoes efforts by the Trump administration to curb the use of Chinese technology in the US and its allies.

The move is part of a broader campaign to increase China’s reliance on home-made technologies, and is likely to fuel concerns of “decoupling”, with supply chains between the US and China being severed.

Earlier this year, Washington banned US companies from doing business with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei, and is looking at ways to help funnel money to its European rivals.

The US recently proposed that technology sales into the US from “foreign adversaries” would be vetted for national security reasons, and has been pressuring European allies to freeze Huawei out of 5G infrastructure projects.
etc.

https://www.ft.com/content/b55fc6ee-178 ... 03645ac406

or google "ft foreign beijing pc". First hit on my FF browser.

It looks the trade war is alive and kicking to me.

Matt

It is all about negotiation and it is not required for 3 years which in politics is a very long time.

China has a lot of political trouble via Hong Kong that add to the uncertainty.

Trump would like to go into next years election as a victor in this war, second best would probably be staying tough.

Trump may get impeached and thrown out, I rate the chance as close to zero but don't know, adding to huge uncertainties.

From an investment trading perspective the market is set up more for the bulls than the bears imho. If nothing happens or the tariff war gets worse as is already priced into the market there is no big change in things. It will take something new and very bad to get the market to sell off.

However, if there is a good settlement in the tariff dispute then the basing over the last 18 months will imho lead to a very sharp rise in US equities. If mainland China starts to go into a political melt down that would indicate that Trump's tactics have hurt them and lead to a big rise in US equities and his chance of being re-elected greatly enhanced and make impeachment and removal even less likely imho.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Ok... Devils Advocate time.

But if the Chinese stop their firms using US-tech goods, most of which are made in China, then how far away is a decision (by Chinese) to stop making US-tech in China? How will the Americans afford to keep buying what they do if the low consumer goods pricing is not bankrolled by cheap chinese labour? Surely the US cost of living will go through the roof?

Matt

[odysseus2000]

Ok... Devils Advocate time.

But if the Chinese stop their firms using US-tech goods, most of which are made in China, then how far away is a decision (by Chinese) to stop making US-tech in China? How will the Americans afford to keep buying what they do if the low consumer goods pricing is not bankrolled by cheap chinese labour? Surely the US cost of living will go through the roof?

Matt

If you look at the newer iPhones you will see they are made in India.

Cook (Apple CEO) has long mentioned how he thinks India has the greatest growth potential of the BRIC nations.

Sure the Chinese could stop making US tech, but then lots of Chinese folk lose their jobs and the potential for a revolution increases exponentially, especially with all the troubles in Hong Kong.

China's political leadership is not in a good position and it will take skill for them to extricate themselves from this while being pressured by the US and other sources of labour to build electronics.

I have most of my PCB manufactured in China but there are other nations hungry for that trade and if we ever get the free ports one of those nations will be GB as a whole lot of the PCB manufacturing and then pick and place assembly is becoming highly automated where low wages do not give a nation an advantage, but being close to consumers coupled with tax free ports does help a manufacturer.

The entire world is changing very fast and that rate of change is accelerating as we enter the robotics and AI revolutions. Many here are focused on 2nd and 3rd order terms regarding Brexit, the real focus should be the 1st order changes that are sweeping across the world and which imho will hurt Germany more than any other nation. German politicians realise this and are busy putting up various smoke screens and forming a European army to prepare, but imho they are missing the big picture that the number of folk needed to make stuff is about to collapse not only with robotics but with all the management overhead as AI with synthetics sweeps across the world.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Ok... Devils Advocate time.

But if the Chinese stop their firms using US-tech goods, most of which are made in China, then how far away is a decision (by Chinese) to stop making US-tech in China? How will the Americans afford to keep buying what they do if the low consumer goods pricing is not bankrolled by cheap chinese labour? Surely the US cost of living will go through the roof?

Matt

If you look at the newer iPhones you will see they are made in India.

Cook (Apple CEO) has long mentioned how he thinks India has the greatest growth potential of the BRIC nations.

Sure the Chinese could stop making US tech, but then lots of Chinese folk lose their jobs and the potential for a revolution increases exponentially, especially with all the troubles in Hong Kong.

China's political leadership is not in a good position and it will take skill for them to extricate themselves from this while being pressured by the US and other sources of labour to build electronics.

I have most of my PCB manufactured in China but there are other nations hungry for that trade and if we ever get the free ports one of those nations will be GB as a whole lot of the PCB manufacturing and then pick and place assembly is becoming highly automated where low wages do not give a nation an advantage, but being close to consumers coupled with tax free ports does help a manufacturer.

The entire world is changing very fast and that rate of change is accelerating as we enter the robotics and AI revolutions. Many here are focused on 2nd and 3rd order terms regarding Brexit, the real focus should be the 1st order changes that are sweeping across the world and which imho will hurt Germany more than any other nation. German politicians realise this and are busy putting up various smoke screens and forming a European army to prepare, but imho they are missing the big picture that the number of folk needed to make stuff is about to collapse not only with robotics but with all the management overhead as AI with synthetics sweeps across the world.

Regards,

Thanks Ody,

Some interesting, albeit a little tangential, points there. Returning to your OP, alas the trade war a la Trump does, right now, has a lot longer to run, in my opinion.

Matt

[odysseus2000]

Begins to look like a US-China limited trade deal will stop new round of tariffs and begin to reduce existing ones.

Likely this will lead to a rally in the US markets, particular sensitive stocks to such tariffs. Whether this is a short term move or more sustained is unclear, but for now things look better than they have since the beginning of this trade dispute.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Of interest?

'Those numbers are almost unfathomable': Farmers skeptical of Trump's $50 billion China promise
President Donald Trump says the Chinese will buy $50 billion worth of farm products as part of a phase one deal struck last week, but that would mean China would have to double the amount it bought from US farmers before the trade war started.

"Those numbers are almost unfathomable," said Mary Kay Thatcher, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer who advocated for the American Farm Bureau for more than 30 years and is now a senior lead of government relations at the agriculture company Syngenta.

"I'm not really sure we can actually produce that much product to send. But I'm sure the agriculture industry would be more than happy to try," Thatcher added.

from:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/19/poli ... index.html

How Trump Lost His Trade War
Trade wars rarely have victors. They do, however, sometimes have losers. And Donald Trump has definitely turned out to be a loser.

Of course, that’s not the way he and his team are portraying the tentative deal they’ve struck with China, which they’re claiming as a triumph. The reality is that the Trump administration achieved almost none of its goals; it has basically declared victory while going into headlong retreat.

And the Chinese know it. As The Times reports, Chinese officials are “jubilant and even incredulous” at the success of their hard-line negotiating strategy.

To understand what just went down, you need to ask what Trump and company were trying to accomplish with their tariffs, and how that compares with what really happened.

First and foremost, Trump wanted to slash the U.S. trade deficit. Economists more or less unanimously consider this the wrong objective, but in Trump’s mind countries win when they sell more than they buy, and nobody is going to convince him otherwise.

So it’s remarkable to note that the trade deficit has risen, not fallen, on Trump’s watch, from $544 billion in 2016 to $691 billion in the 12 months ending in October.

And what Trump wanted in particular was to close the trade deficit in manufactured goods; despite giving lip service to “great Patriot Farmers,” it’s clear that he actually has contempt for agricultural exports. Last summer, complaining about the U.S. trade relationship with Japan, he sneered: “We send them wheat. Wheat. That’s not a good deal.”

So now we appear to have a trade deal with China whose main substantive element is … a promise to buy more U.S. farm goods.

Trump’s team also wanted to put the brakes on China’s drive to establish itself as the world’s economic superpower. “China is basically trying to steal the future,” declared Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, a year ago. But the new deal, while it includes some promises to protect intellectual property, leaves the core of China’s industrial strategy — what’s been called the “vast web of subsidies that has fueled the global rise of many Chinese companies” — untouched.

So why did Trump wimp out on trade?

At a broad level, the answer is that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. America was never going to succeed in bullying a huge, proud nation whose economy is already, by some measures, larger than ours — especially while simultaneously alienating other advanced economies that might have joined us in pressuring China to change some of its economic policies.

At a more granular level, none of the pieces of Trump trade strategy have worked as promised.

Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that China is paying his tariffs, the facts say otherwise: Chinese export prices haven’t gone down, which means that the tariffs are falling on U.S. consumers and companies. And the bite on consumers would have gone up substantially if Trump hadn’t called off the round of further tariff increases that had been scheduled for this past Sunday.

At the same time, Chinese retaliation has hit some U.S. exporters, farmers in particular, hard. And while Trump may quietly hold farm exports in contempt, he needs those rural votes — votes that were being put at risk despite a farm bailout that has already cost more than twice as much as Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto industry.

the rest is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/opin ... trade.html

Matt

[odysseus2000]

The NY times has an agenda to oppose Trump as does the Washington Post owned by Bezos.

It is easy to argue almost any direction on any issue and that is the basis of the justice system of the English speaking people and other vested interests will argue Trump got a great deal.

This NY Times article is cherry picking what it wants to injure Trump, just as the House has done to impeach him. A re-run of the conservative battering of Clinton when he was Prez. It didn't hurt Clinton. Maybe it hurts Trump, but I have my doubts, especially as the GOP holds the Senate.

The only real analysis of the Trump deal that means anythings comes from the equity markets which have rallied on the deal. If it was the rubbish wimp out that the NY Times portrays it is hard to believe the equity markets would rally like this.

Many of the NYTimes readership need no extra reasons to hate Trump, but they are not the electorate.

For now I am still expecting Trump to win the 2020 election.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

The NY times has an agenda to oppose Trump as does the Washington Post owned by Bezos.

Of course. Why not post some decent honest analysis from right-leaning press to float any countering data?

Matt

[odysseus2000]

The NY times has an agenda to oppose Trump as does the Washington Post owned by Bezos.

Of course. Why not post some decent honest analysis from right-leaning press to float any countering data?

Matt

I long gave up on analysis which I find steers me into some wild and imaginary places.

Now I watch price action and think about what is happening at the most basic level possible. This may seem like dumbing down, but it has been a long hard journey to unlearn many things that I developed during my education to PhD level and subsequent research career made worse by intense study of many erudite writers and opinion makers. It is counter intuitive to everything taught in the education system that rewards complexity over simple, but if you study e.g. Buffett & Munger you do not find minds seeking complexity but minds seeking simplicity.

There were many things that set me on this course but watching and studying folk who have made a lot of money rather than studying folk who have done nothing and yet write about things as though they hold the correct view on many things. Adding to my shift in views was my observation that the majority of the folk who put forward these correct views got things badly wrong and I was inhabiting a mental world of imagination with a deep disconnect to reality.

In terms of investment/trading I look at what Trumps motivation is in the tariff war and what is the motivation of the folk who oppose him. As I see this Trump is attempting to reverse the tariffs that China once needed to develop, but which are no longer needed by China, to a more level playing field. Whereas many of his opponents are just opposing him and finding 2nd, 3rd... order terms to justify their belief that what ever Trump does is bad. Of course if I wrote this in a uni paper I would get very low marks, whereas someone putting forward intense complexity would get high marks. My contention is that a uni approach to say science, or engineering where complexity is highly relevant is inappropriate for life, investment, politics where simplicity is the most important of things.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

I really wasn't looking for a lecture, pardoning the oblique pun on your Uni days.

Just some counter arguments and opposing data, e.g. How much the yankee farmers and the chinese factory workers are affected by the trade war so far, and how much internal representation/power either group has from within.

It's pretty simple really.

So of course, the chinese are not without their share of internal problems. Sure we've all heard about Hong Kong and the Xinjiang camps. But these issues are about the erosion of provincial autonomy, with a bit of religious suppression blended in too, in the second case. They have nothing to do with impact of a trade war, unlike the impact which DJT's failed bravado has on his own citizens, especially his farmers.

Matt

[odysseus2000]

I really wasn't looking for a lecture, pardoning the oblique pun on your Uni days.

Just some counter arguments and opposing data, e.g. How much the yankee farmers and the chinese factory workers are affected by the trade war so far, and how much internal representation/power either group has from within.

It's pretty simple really.

So of course, the chinese are not without their share of internal problems. Sure we've all heard about Hong Kong and the Xinjiang camps. But these issues are about the erosion of provincial autonomy, with a bit of religious suppression blended in too, in the second case. They have nothing to do with impact of a trade war, unlike the impact which DJT's failed bravado has on his own citizens, especially his farmers.

Matt

It is never simple.

Few beneficiaries of help will tell you how it has helped them as they all want more & Trump -ve commentators will amplify any complaining.

This is one of Buffett's gripes about his charitable giving as unlike business where there are sales to tell you if things are being done well, with charity folk never refuse & so you never really know if what you are doing is optimum for them.

The only way I have found to weigh the good or bad of a policy is time & looking at overall effects.

I have never found analysis before a process has run for some time to tell me anything useful, but if it works for you then carry on.

Regards,

[GoSeigen]

It is never simple.

It's amazing how this poster can argue exactly the opposite point to the one he was pompously holding forth about barely an hour earlier!

Quoting from the lecture of 7:04pm:

My contention is that a uni approach to say science, or engineering where complexity is highly relevant is inappropriate for life, investment, politics where simplicity is the most important of things.



GS

[redsturgeon]

It is never simple.

It's amazing how this poster can argue exactly the opposite point to the one he was pompously holding forth about barely an hour earlier!

Quoting from the lecture of 7:04pm:

My contention is that a uni approach to say science, or engineering where complexity is highly relevant is inappropriate for life, investment, politics where simplicity is the most important of things.



GS

Aha, but perhaps we are looking at the simplicity at the far side of complexity!

John

[odysseus2000]

Its like common sense which isn't so common.

Regards,

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

With all due respect, isn't this thread supposedly about objectively discussing, as much as our misty window on the world will allow, the US-China Tariff war, rather than a somewhat ego-centric spat of form you take the high road and I'll take the low road?

Matt

[TheMotorcycleBoy]

Trump's lack of strategic vision is going to make China great again
Financial markets were cheered recently by the news that the US and China have reached a “phase one” deal to prevent further escalation of their bilateral trade war. But there is actually very little to cheer about. In exchange for China’s tentative commitment to buy more US agricultural (and some other) goods, and modest concessions on intellectual property rights and the yuan, the US agreed to withhold tariffs on another $160bn (£124bn) worth of Chinese exports, and to roll back some of the tariffs introduced on 1 September.

The good news for investors is that the deal averted a new round of tariffs that could have tipped the US and the global economy into recession and crashed global stock markets. The bad news is that it represents just another temporary truce amid a much larger strategic rivalry encompassing trade, technology, investment, currency and geopolitical issues. Large-scale tariffs will remain in place and escalation may well resume if either side shirks its commitments.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... reat-again

So is this more horribly biased reporting by the foul left press? What's the truth?

[dspp]

Implementing Grand
Strategy Toward China
Twenty-Two U.S. Policy Prescriptions

American disillusionment with China and with the U.S.-China relationship has increased sharply in recent years. This thinking crosses
party lines, fueled by China’s internal and external policies alike.
China’s economic practices, including its theft and forced transfer of
intellectual property and the lack of market access for U.S. firms, are
especially unpopular. Adding to the shift in American attitudes is the
view that China has become more assertive abroad (in pressing its
claims to the South China Sea, its policy toward Taiwan, and its dealings with neighbors) and at home, where the Chinese government has
begun a campaign of forced detentions in Xinjiang, is tightening its
control over Hong Kong, and is constricting civil society throughout
the country.
.......the modern U.S.-China relationship can usefully be
divided into four phases. The first phase, which lasted from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China until rapprochement under
President Richard M. Nixon, was one of open hostility. The United
States much preferred that the Communists not win the internal struggle for power that resumed following World War II, and after they did,
the two countries fought on opposite sides during the Korean War. The
second phase, animated by a shared antipathy toward the Soviet Union,
lasted until the end of the Cold War; it was one in which the United
States and China worked together to counter the Soviet threat. In the
wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the relationship entered
its third phase, typified by increasing investment, trade, and China’s
integration into the global economy. Now, without a strategic rationale
for the relationship and a questioning of the benefits of close economic
ties, we are in a fourth phase that has yet to be defined but is increasingly
characterized much more by competition than cooperation.
Blackwill argues the United States needs a new grand strategy to
navigate this fourth phase of the Sino-American relationship.


https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files ... _China.pdf

Only problem is Tweeter don't need no strategy.

dspp

[odysseus2000]

China to halve tariffs on hundreds of US goods. The sort of things that happen when wars wind down. Imho this is super bullish for equities in what is the greatest bull market I have seen:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/china-t ... r=sharebar

Regards,