The stock markets were all up on Tuesday, mostly due to President Donald Trump backing off his threats to impose the further tariffs on Chinese imports that have lately been dragging the stock markets down. Trump is loathe to admit a mistake, but he hates a slumping stock market even more.
By backing off his threat of another 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of such popular Chinese imports as cellphones and laptop computers, at least until the Christmas buying season is well underway, lest retail sales suffer, Trump has tacitly admitted that all his talk about how the Chinese are paying the billions of dollars in tariffs rather than the American consumer was pure balderdash. He won’t openly admit it, of course, and his die-hard fans will indulge him the fiction, but the smart money in stock markets and the rest of the world know the score.
Trump somehow became President of the United States on the argument that he wrote “The Art of Deal,” and that as the world’s greatest negotiator he would deliver the greatest trade deals in the history of the world, but for now he’s more intent on maintaining a slow but steady economic status quo. This makes it harder for him to deliver on his promise of that greatest trade deal ever with China in time for his reelection day, as he has clearly blinked in these high-stakes negations and the Chinese are stereotypically wily enough to notice, but if the stock markets are up and the unemployment rate is down ob election day the die-hard fans won’t mind.
This all comes as the brutal Chinese dictatorship is brutally cracking down on pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, which Trump cares little about and rightly assumes that most of the voters in America care even less about. and he is not going to express any indignation about that. Trump claims that his very close friendship with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is the reason that Sino-American relations are going so swimmingly, and he’s not one to let a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protestors get in the way of a such a beautiful friendship.
November is a long ways off, and the next November even longer off, and there’s no telling how things might be by then. We’ll hold out hope that economy will be chugging along at a slow but steady rate, prepare as best as we can for the worst, and not expect that Trump or any damned Democrat will strike the greatest deal ever made.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 