Donald Trump has threatened to impose additional US tariffs of 100% on China from next month, accusing Beijing of “very hostile” moves to restrict exports of rare earths needed for American industry.
Wall Street fell sharply after the US president reignited public tensions with the Chinese government, and raised the prospect of another acrimonious trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
All of the things necessary to deal with this are already underway. People are already setting up to mine non-China deposits. Make magnets outside China. Separate rare earths concentrates into the individual rare earths outside China. And on and on and on.
Of course idiot governments are going to throw money around and they already have been doing. But markets see? Prices change – as they are doing – and actions change. We’re done.
Sigh.
Tim, seems to me the United States and China are on course to fight a major war and all these argy bargies between them over rare earths, cars, Venezuela etc. are the fake ‘because’.
The real because is who gets to be master of Asia and ultimately the world?
China building all those hundreds of new navy hulls is Chekhov’s gun. Later on, it’ll be used to shoot at Captain Kirk. Unless China falls to its own internal contradictions, or the US does. Can we think of any examples of a country building up enormous naval power without using it? Tirpitz’s luxury fleet mibbe, to the great consternation of Admiral Tirpitz? But the mere existence of the luxury fleet was enough to doom Germany to war with England.
The Hochseesflotte was the paramount of naval design and engineering too. It’s gunnery used the latest optical technology and the ammunition was far more destructive than anyone else’s.
Question is : the Chinese Navy is nice and shiny but does it actually float ?
It wasn’t the “mere existence” alone; there was also the small matter of Kaiser Bill boasting repeatedly that its purpose was to sink the Royal Navy in the North Sea. Bismarck must have been worn smooth rotating in his grave.
That dim tit – Bill not Otto – did more damage to the world than even Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler, not least because without Kaiser Bill we’d never have heard of L,S, or H. And therefore probably not of Mao either, nor Pol Pot, nor …
Was Kaiser Bill the most destructive bastard since Napoleon? Must have been. Since Attila the Hun? Since …?
Yes but I do recommend Admiral Tirpitz’s memoirs from 1919 where he rails against the curious mixture of circumspection, strategic naivety and aggression that dogged their war effort. They made the same mistake the Austrian painter later did wrt to the British Empire.
However, even if Wilhelm had publicly sworn everlasting friendship to England, the mere existence of the naval laws was what put them on a road to conflict with Britain – states assess foreign threats based on capabilities, not intent.
To their great detriment, Germans have always seemed to struggle to read the room…
I s’pose if you think Trump’s threat is about trade, true.
BiS I was at parent’s evening recently and apparently one of my children is learning Mandarin at school (!). What a crazy world we live in today. In my day, you didn’t need to know Mandarin, because the menu was in English.
I always assumed that most take aways were run by Cantonese..
Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these
Why bother? Anyone from England going to China is going to go to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzen. And whether you’re getting a drink, food, taxi, or paying for a hooker, they’re going to speak English. Because there’s a significant global presence there.
And if you’re not doing that, it won’t be a language you learned or you’ll be rusty. Like I finally got to use my German about 30 years after I left school. But you go to Bern, the hotel speaks English. The taxi driver figures you aren’t local, points to the amount and tells you in English. The ticket machine from Zurich to Bern has an English option. I’m sure that if I went off into some cheesemaking village near Liechtenstein that I’d need some German, but odds are I’ll never do it, so learn it fast when the situation arises.
I do find my boyhood Latin a comfort whenever I have to use public transport.
I managed to sell my Alibaba holdings on the way down and buy back in just before close. Give it a week or two and it’ll be back where it was. I’m not even quite sure I follow the logic of an 8% hit to Alibaba, when the company sells about 1-3% to the USA, but TACO trades have made me a few quid.
Gamecock sold a big chunk of stock two days before, too. Warm, fuzzy feeling of smartness.
‘Cept I was just getting cash for my Required Minimum Distribution. Pure luck. But, still somehow, it makes me feel smart. K . . . figured it out. If I had waited a week, Ida felt really stupid.