Monday, May 27, 2019

Trade War: The Spiral Down Scenario

Both Xi and Trump are talking tough. Right now they are sounding like they are in no hurry, and they don't expect to even talk in Japan when they meet at the G20 summit.

First, you raise tariffs, one on the other, first a little, on a little, then a lot, on a lot, until you have everything at 25%. That raises prices. Somebody did the math on that and said it will be like an $800 tax on every American consumer. The unhappiness of the Iowa farmers, it seems, is contagious. It is going to engulf the nation.

But now that whole thing looks like a sideshow. The US started by saying we don't want to buy 5G equipment from Huawei, equipment that Huawei claims is much better and much cheaper than the competition. That was that. But I guess that was not enough. Trump would like to kill Huawei off entirely. He has decided US companies that sell chips to Huawei may not do so. A three-month reprieve has been provided.

China's response has been, well, 90% of the rare earth minerals on which the US high tech industries depend comes from China. We could choke that.

Tariffs were warm-up. This is war. This really is trade war.

Is decoupling possible? People have started to talk in terms of a tech iron curtain. Some are saying this might last 20 years. I am not so sure. If all this is allowed to play out for just one year, that would accelerate the US economy into a recession. A recession would kick Donald Trump out of office.

If Apple were to lose 500 billion dollars in market value, what do you think that will do to the US consumer sentiment? Trump is as unprepared for the China trade war as he was for his talks with the North Korean leader. He does not believe in doing homework. He has not thought this through. There is no grand strategy.

Has Britain been able to decouple from Europe? The Chinese and US economies are even more interconnected.

This is not going to be painless for China either. The middle class in China is already plenty anxious about the implications of where this is going.

It makes sense for the Chinese to engage in some opening up. That is much better than a full-fledged trade war.

Both the US and China might actively seek to export and import more from other countries. But these two happen to be the two largest economies. There is no avoiding that. If Germany and France were engaged in a trade war, they might readily find substitutes. But the US and China are too big to have that option. There are no substitute economies for them.

I don't believe this is about democracy. Trump does not much care for democracy in America. Forget China. I believe this is about the lost manufacturing base in the US. The diagnosis is highly inaccurate. Most manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation.

Trump's trade war is as stupid as the border wall he wants to build. It will only lead to a recession.

If the trade war continues into 2020, it surely will be the central issue in the presidential election. It will be much talked about.


as 2020 draws near and the world is on the cusp of ultra-fast 5G networks, the US has found itself without a telecommunications hardware champion that can compete with major 5G players such as China’s Huawei Technologies, Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson.
5G offers world’s biggest mobile market a gateway to the industrial internet

No comments: