Xi and Trump’s fight for global supremacy. Could the White House strike a deal with Iran as soon as this weekend? A soybean farmer’s appeal to the president. And much more.
The US can no longer countenance China's malevolent agenda.
It is time to stand independently and re-industrialise.
Just one of the hundreds of examples is that China has weaponised NetZero. Our dopey politicians (and voters) have fallen for it because China was wise enough to offer politicians a conditional piece of the pie and concurrently weaponise social media to sell this "plausible fairytale".
The Revolution started 50 years ago when then President Nixon courted China, expecting them to play by Western Rules. It is important to understand a culture, different from our own, well before entering into an agreement with them. China does not, and never has, played by our rules.
When the agreement came to manufacture in China, factories were closed in the South and Midwest. Millions of USA citizens were thrown out of work. In addition, Chinese students came to this country to steal our technologies and spy on us. You need to know whom you can trust.
Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. We need jobs back in the USA. We need the well made good quality products we have been known for in the past and will be known for again. We have done it before and can do it again. It is NOT economical to buy 3 cheap products for 3 times the price of one well made one. This happened to me and to many others.
For the first time in years, we have a President who loves the USA more than himself. All these nay-sayers will find that the USA will be stronger than ever. We have plenty of jobs available in the defense industry. We need to be vigilant that our suppliers don't rip us off by selling us 50 cent screws for $20 or more. If we work together to right the wrongs we have allowed foreign countries and our own greedy citizens to foist on us, we will win their respect and prosper. Assume that our President knows what he is doing and has information we don't have in making decisions.
Donald Trump is doing something about violent antisemitism in the entirely wrong way, but university administrators had their chance to address it and they failed. Guaranteed nothing would be done if the Democrats had won the day last year. So suck it, KKK (Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan) bitches. No, I don't like the way Trump is going about this but at least he's addressing it. Antisemitism is one of the many reasons why so many of us no longer the 'progressive' Democratic Party.
I don't think we've seen the half of it yet. Qatari and Omani money is shot through the entire university sector. They are not our friends. It's not just about anti-semitism (though the systematic violation of the civil rights of American citizens by non-citizens warrants immediate ejection without appeal), it's about national security.
Reporting on the soy bean farmers being adversely impacted by tariffs without reporting on the cattle farmers who will be positively impacted is either sloppy journalism or TDS bias. Which is it?
The author seems to think that a pause in tariffs is a defeat for Trump. Hardly the case. This is high stakes negotiating. Not all situations will be winners, but enough will be to meet the financial goals stated. And the China decoupling will be the most interesting aspect of all of this.
I don’t even know what weaponizing anti-Semitism means. Academia has weaponized its administrators, faculty and students against Jews using the pretense of a gaza genocide that is nothing more than an urban myth.
Dear Bari: This country needs to get its financial house in order before the next financial crisis--then it is too late! And they rag on Trump! Kent Baum
With more than 70 countries offering to open negotiations with the United States, maybe isolating China has been the main goal all along. Our ruling elites have known for many years that China is ripping us off along with the rest of the world, but until now, nobody's been willing to do anything about it.
Maybe our politicians are more concerned with not jeopardizing their comfortable sinecures making tough decisions, or maybe they've already resigned themselves to a future where China becomes the preeminent superpower. Who knows?
Fortunately for those who don't want to see that future, Trump 2.0 is like the honey badger. He don't give a $#!+.
Well divorces tend to be messy when one side is stealing the other blind, cheating, poisoning their tea, and wielding immense economic harm by underpinning a pandemic, invasions on Ukraine, and attacks on Isreal, the last two under the guise of historical claims, when in reality all variables, from Fentanyl to state sponsored hype bots pushing Deep Seek misinformation on social platforms, and Tik Tok serving up self harm content to 12 year olds, are unified by one intent, and that is to wield economic and cultural warfaire against Europe and the West. A strategist gets this. Those who sold their souls for Material gain are seriously gnashing their teeth right now. Insert: Ray Dalio( ones like him), too many Liberal politicians., Media, Corporations, Universities and Hollywood here...
Short term that divorce feels horrible. Long term it saves you....
For those not getting what is happening.... please be smarter and pay attention. I can always tell who has never studied the art of negotiation and its many forms. And history. Living by headlines not actions.
I am painfuly aware that if Churchill had to deal with the social media meltdowns void of all of the critical intel, we would have lost.
This is going to be a long 4 years. I am so over the daily Trump hysteria. I have stopped reading most articles about him. They are opinion pieces. Many so called journalism outlets would fold if it were not for Trump. Trump hysterics keeps them in business.
My blue voting friends post day and night about the big bad Trump. I thought his haters said they were all going to the platform that caters to them?
The FP strangely limits itself to giving a vague cause to why Trump has blinked on his tariffs: “some ominous moves in the bond market”. That was the rise in the US Treasury bonds yield, which are supposed to be the refuge of investment when the stock market crashes. That unusual yield increase signals that investors are losing confidence in US bonds, the ultimate refuge, which indicates a possible wholesale economic collapse, which spooked even Trump.
To those who endlessly post around here their messages of deep devotion to whatever Trump does, smart or dumb, and who believe that since they don’t own stocks they are “insulated” from economic collapse, I quote the recent words of a columnist: “some people believe that they’re not going to feel the cold just because they don’t own a thermometer”.
In more plain English, just acting stupid and blind doesn’t mean one is not going to get burned by an economy crashed by uncertainty. If you own a few million in stocks and you lose 20%, chances are you’ll survive. If you proudly don’t own stocks, most likely you have no savings and you’ll hurt just from the inflation that will keep creeping up. If the economy craters, you’ll simply not make ends meet. You’ll might have to dine on your devotion.
Do you actually see any connection whatsoever between my post and your comment? Would you please point out exactly where in my post I said or suggested that we should “keep printing money and spend tax dollars that we don’t have”? Or repeating these platitudes that you heard from others allows you to exorcise any facts or ideas that might upset your faith?
This "divorce" reminds me of a client when I did legal aid for a domestic violence shelter. Her live-in boyfriend had recently bought a pistol and taken out a life insurance policy on her for $1,000,000, paid for with her credit card. As a nation, America is at that moment when my client found the receipts and figured out the guy had a plan.
The CCP has consistently and openly stated that it intends to be the sole superpower by 2049. Yet we crawled into bed with it anyway. Extracting ourselves is an act of survival, and we need to chew off this Communist Chinese paw to save our lives.
For those feeling whiplash from tariffs on/off, just think of this as carrot/stick training for the rest of the world on the new economic order President Trump hopes to usher in. President Trump has given the rest of the world the brief, gentle touch from the stick. For those that responded with an appropriate aversion to the stick, they now get the opportunity to taste the carrots--enter into fair deals with the US. For those who were not impressed by the stick (e.g. China), more beatings. In the alternative think of this as a good cop/bad cop negotiation between the US and the rest of the world. The only change President Trump has made to the normal good cop/bad cop script is that he plays both rolls. And it is a little like a Taylor Sheridan series. instead of trying to have the whole series scripted out from the start, President Trump is writing his script only a couple of episodes ahead of real time.
Problem with the carrot/stick approach is that the carrot is simply the removal of the use of the stick, at least temporarily, until the Administration decides that it wants more, which you've alluded to with "President Trump is writing his script only a couple of episodes ahead of real time".
No whiplash. $2T has been committed to the US from Apple, Nvidia and so many more. How is everyone on here thinking with a conservative prediction of a 40% reduction in workers due to AI, and going from 7 workers to 1 on Social Security in 1950, soon to be a 2:1 ratio, our economy and systems will hold. Be better folks. The immense rot and waste, coupled with a wholesale sell out from too many fronts.... yes, there will be pain.. Suck it up. We must lift and shift these unholy alliances. Internally and externally. So stop being putzs that put self above doing what is right...
And yet, given the level of automation in production for companies like Apple and Nvidia, how much of an increase in employment is realistically expected? What are they going to be doing there? Pick-and-place machines assembling boards with wave soldering to make the connections? This will be able to be built up faster than the ability to actually produce the silicon wafers, which is extremely expensive and take a number of years to build up, and still be mostly automated.
Even with a reduction in need for labor, it's still waaaay better that design and production is on our own soil. We should not be beholden to our enemies for the raw materials needed to fight them.
But we aren't talking about raw materials; we are talking about finished products. Apple, in addition to manufacturing in China, also does manufacturing in US allies like Brazil and India. NVidia manufactures their chips in Taiwan, a US ally. Nor does this deal with the push to move auto manufacturing to the US from allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico. While I agree that design and production is better on home soil, could that not also be argued by the countries that the countervailing tariffs are being applied to? It may not be intentional, but it comes across as the US wants free access to the markets elsewhere but that is not reciprocated.
If you really are talking about raw materials, what constitutes a raw material? For instance, if you are talking about aluminum, are you referring to the refined aluminum or the raw Bauxite from which it is extracted?
The beatings from the “big stick” are not just for China and other countries, deserving or not of this treatment. It’s also for the American economy. Trumped blinked and backtracked on his tariffs yesterday because he saw the rising yield on the US bonds. That’s supposed to be the ultimate refuge when stocks crash, but that rising yield showed investors were losing confidence even in these bonds. The threat was a collapse of the American economy, which Trump would have 100% personally owned. That’s really what happened, whatever veneer true believers want to put over it.
“The big turn came Monday into Tuesday, when investors were dumping anything American. Stocks and bonds, including supersafe U.S. government debt, sold off in tandem. The dollar plunged. A trader for Citigroup said global investors became concerned and started to sell U.S. government bonds. “
From WSJ, April 11, 2025, article “Wall Street’s Best Hope to End Trump’s Global Trade War Is One of Its Own”
The national media has covered in great detail the events of Wednesday (the drop in stocks, the rise in the US bonds yield, Trump’s announcement of the suspension of (most) reciprocal tariffs, the climb in stocks). Unfortunately I don’t have links or article names. The stories in publications such as the WSJ and even the NYT were very similar and straightforward, because Trump, Bessent and other officials were quite candid and open. Of course they claimed that it was as planned all the way, but Bessent was the one who insisted on pointing to the unexpected bond yield response and apparently Trump has a lot of experience with that type of issue from his NYC real estate days, so he reacted quickly.
The key factor was not the stock market drop which would not be surprising in a beginning of a recession, but the rise in the bond yield from below 4% to 4.5%. In a nutshell, what that means is that investors worldwide were losing confidence in the US bonds, which are supposed to be the ultimate cover when the stock market craters. If that continued it could have led to the collapse of the economy, which sits on tens of trillions in debt (bonds).
There are two articles today that summarize what happened in this respect: “The Simple Explanation for This Week’s Treasury Market Mayhem”, April 11 in WSJ and “‘This is Not Normal’: Trump’s Tariffs Upend the Bond Market”, April 11 in the NYT. Of course, everything in the NYT is to be used with extreme caution, but again, what happened to the US bond yields and what role that played in Trump’s decision doesn’t appear to be in any way controversial.
Britain, yes, but also thoughtful commentators in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, throughout the EU - well, the list goes on. Surely they can’t *all* be wrong? 🤔
Agreed. Commentators from outside the US are more likely to be attuned to the political and cultural climate in those countries that are the targets of the tariffs. How often do you hear about that on American news media, regardless of the political leaning of the media source?
He's spectacularly wrong about a good many things in that interview. It's hard to know where to begin. But I would suggest that a year or two from now, some enterprising person @ TFP might want to dig this interview up, and provide analysis on what he got wrong, and what he got right. I expect it won't be balanced in the least.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that Niall Ferguson has ever gone 5,000 words without predicting the end of the "American Empire", whatever that is.
He's like the Cubs with their billy goat, though the Cubs, indeed, eventually won another World Series. When there's a 1/30 chance of an event every year, you might live to see it.
On the other hand, there isn't a 1/30 chance of our empire dying in any given year.
Trump has identified that China has been waging economic war on the US for at least a decade. Not responding is far more dangerous than trying to address the problem.
The US can no longer countenance China's malevolent agenda.
It is time to stand independently and re-industrialise.
Just one of the hundreds of examples is that China has weaponised NetZero. Our dopey politicians (and voters) have fallen for it because China was wise enough to offer politicians a conditional piece of the pie and concurrently weaponise social media to sell this "plausible fairytale".
Wake up world.
The Revolution started 50 years ago when then President Nixon courted China, expecting them to play by Western Rules. It is important to understand a culture, different from our own, well before entering into an agreement with them. China does not, and never has, played by our rules.
When the agreement came to manufacture in China, factories were closed in the South and Midwest. Millions of USA citizens were thrown out of work. In addition, Chinese students came to this country to steal our technologies and spy on us. You need to know whom you can trust.
Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. We need jobs back in the USA. We need the well made good quality products we have been known for in the past and will be known for again. We have done it before and can do it again. It is NOT economical to buy 3 cheap products for 3 times the price of one well made one. This happened to me and to many others.
For the first time in years, we have a President who loves the USA more than himself. All these nay-sayers will find that the USA will be stronger than ever. We have plenty of jobs available in the defense industry. We need to be vigilant that our suppliers don't rip us off by selling us 50 cent screws for $20 or more. If we work together to right the wrongs we have allowed foreign countries and our own greedy citizens to foist on us, we will win their respect and prosper. Assume that our President knows what he is doing and has information we don't have in making decisions.
Donald Trump is doing something about violent antisemitism in the entirely wrong way, but university administrators had their chance to address it and they failed. Guaranteed nothing would be done if the Democrats had won the day last year. So suck it, KKK (Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan) bitches. No, I don't like the way Trump is going about this but at least he's addressing it. Antisemitism is one of the many reasons why so many of us no longer the 'progressive' Democratic Party.
I don't think we've seen the half of it yet. Qatari and Omani money is shot through the entire university sector. They are not our friends. It's not just about anti-semitism (though the systematic violation of the civil rights of American citizens by non-citizens warrants immediate ejection without appeal), it's about national security.
Reporting on the soy bean farmers being adversely impacted by tariffs without reporting on the cattle farmers who will be positively impacted is either sloppy journalism or TDS bias. Which is it?
The author seems to think that a pause in tariffs is a defeat for Trump. Hardly the case. This is high stakes negotiating. Not all situations will be winners, but enough will be to meet the financial goals stated. And the China decoupling will be the most interesting aspect of all of this.
I don’t even know what weaponizing anti-Semitism means. Academia has weaponized its administrators, faculty and students against Jews using the pretense of a gaza genocide that is nothing more than an urban myth.
In fact, it is a blood libel.
Overly dramatic nonsense.
Dear Bari: This country needs to get its financial house in order before the next financial crisis--then it is too late! And they rag on Trump! Kent Baum
With more than 70 countries offering to open negotiations with the United States, maybe isolating China has been the main goal all along. Our ruling elites have known for many years that China is ripping us off along with the rest of the world, but until now, nobody's been willing to do anything about it.
Maybe our politicians are more concerned with not jeopardizing their comfortable sinecures making tough decisions, or maybe they've already resigned themselves to a future where China becomes the preeminent superpower. Who knows?
Fortunately for those who don't want to see that future, Trump 2.0 is like the honey badger. He don't give a $#!+.
Well divorces tend to be messy when one side is stealing the other blind, cheating, poisoning their tea, and wielding immense economic harm by underpinning a pandemic, invasions on Ukraine, and attacks on Isreal, the last two under the guise of historical claims, when in reality all variables, from Fentanyl to state sponsored hype bots pushing Deep Seek misinformation on social platforms, and Tik Tok serving up self harm content to 12 year olds, are unified by one intent, and that is to wield economic and cultural warfaire against Europe and the West. A strategist gets this. Those who sold their souls for Material gain are seriously gnashing their teeth right now. Insert: Ray Dalio( ones like him), too many Liberal politicians., Media, Corporations, Universities and Hollywood here...
Short term that divorce feels horrible. Long term it saves you....
For those not getting what is happening.... please be smarter and pay attention. I can always tell who has never studied the art of negotiation and its many forms. And history. Living by headlines not actions.
I am painfuly aware that if Churchill had to deal with the social media meltdowns void of all of the critical intel, we would have lost.
One word : INDIA.... if we are smart.
This is going to be a long 4 years. I am so over the daily Trump hysteria. I have stopped reading most articles about him. They are opinion pieces. Many so called journalism outlets would fold if it were not for Trump. Trump hysterics keeps them in business.
My blue voting friends post day and night about the big bad Trump. I thought his haters said they were all going to the platform that caters to them?
"Let him cook" is AAVE
I didn't vote for this.
The FP strangely limits itself to giving a vague cause to why Trump has blinked on his tariffs: “some ominous moves in the bond market”. That was the rise in the US Treasury bonds yield, which are supposed to be the refuge of investment when the stock market crashes. That unusual yield increase signals that investors are losing confidence in US bonds, the ultimate refuge, which indicates a possible wholesale economic collapse, which spooked even Trump.
To those who endlessly post around here their messages of deep devotion to whatever Trump does, smart or dumb, and who believe that since they don’t own stocks they are “insulated” from economic collapse, I quote the recent words of a columnist: “some people believe that they’re not going to feel the cold just because they don’t own a thermometer”.
In more plain English, just acting stupid and blind doesn’t mean one is not going to get burned by an economy crashed by uncertainty. If you own a few million in stocks and you lose 20%, chances are you’ll survive. If you proudly don’t own stocks, most likely you have no savings and you’ll hurt just from the inflation that will keep creeping up. If the economy craters, you’ll simply not make ends meet. You’ll might have to dine on your devotion.
so keep printing money and spending tax dollars we don't have?
Do you actually see any connection whatsoever between my post and your comment? Would you please point out exactly where in my post I said or suggested that we should “keep printing money and spend tax dollars that we don’t have”? Or repeating these platitudes that you heard from others allows you to exorcise any facts or ideas that might upset your faith?
This "divorce" reminds me of a client when I did legal aid for a domestic violence shelter. Her live-in boyfriend had recently bought a pistol and taken out a life insurance policy on her for $1,000,000, paid for with her credit card. As a nation, America is at that moment when my client found the receipts and figured out the guy had a plan.
The CCP has consistently and openly stated that it intends to be the sole superpower by 2049. Yet we crawled into bed with it anyway. Extracting ourselves is an act of survival, and we need to chew off this Communist Chinese paw to save our lives.
For those feeling whiplash from tariffs on/off, just think of this as carrot/stick training for the rest of the world on the new economic order President Trump hopes to usher in. President Trump has given the rest of the world the brief, gentle touch from the stick. For those that responded with an appropriate aversion to the stick, they now get the opportunity to taste the carrots--enter into fair deals with the US. For those who were not impressed by the stick (e.g. China), more beatings. In the alternative think of this as a good cop/bad cop negotiation between the US and the rest of the world. The only change President Trump has made to the normal good cop/bad cop script is that he plays both rolls. And it is a little like a Taylor Sheridan series. instead of trying to have the whole series scripted out from the start, President Trump is writing his script only a couple of episodes ahead of real time.
Problem with the carrot/stick approach is that the carrot is simply the removal of the use of the stick, at least temporarily, until the Administration decides that it wants more, which you've alluded to with "President Trump is writing his script only a couple of episodes ahead of real time".
No whiplash. $2T has been committed to the US from Apple, Nvidia and so many more. How is everyone on here thinking with a conservative prediction of a 40% reduction in workers due to AI, and going from 7 workers to 1 on Social Security in 1950, soon to be a 2:1 ratio, our economy and systems will hold. Be better folks. The immense rot and waste, coupled with a wholesale sell out from too many fronts.... yes, there will be pain.. Suck it up. We must lift and shift these unholy alliances. Internally and externally. So stop being putzs that put self above doing what is right...
And yet, given the level of automation in production for companies like Apple and Nvidia, how much of an increase in employment is realistically expected? What are they going to be doing there? Pick-and-place machines assembling boards with wave soldering to make the connections? This will be able to be built up faster than the ability to actually produce the silicon wafers, which is extremely expensive and take a number of years to build up, and still be mostly automated.
Even with a reduction in need for labor, it's still waaaay better that design and production is on our own soil. We should not be beholden to our enemies for the raw materials needed to fight them.
But we aren't talking about raw materials; we are talking about finished products. Apple, in addition to manufacturing in China, also does manufacturing in US allies like Brazil and India. NVidia manufactures their chips in Taiwan, a US ally. Nor does this deal with the push to move auto manufacturing to the US from allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico. While I agree that design and production is better on home soil, could that not also be argued by the countries that the countervailing tariffs are being applied to? It may not be intentional, but it comes across as the US wants free access to the markets elsewhere but that is not reciprocated.
If you really are talking about raw materials, what constitutes a raw material? For instance, if you are talking about aluminum, are you referring to the refined aluminum or the raw Bauxite from which it is extracted?
The beatings from the “big stick” are not just for China and other countries, deserving or not of this treatment. It’s also for the American economy. Trumped blinked and backtracked on his tariffs yesterday because he saw the rising yield on the US bonds. That’s supposed to be the ultimate refuge when stocks crash, but that rising yield showed investors were losing confidence even in these bonds. The threat was a collapse of the American economy, which Trump would have 100% personally owned. That’s really what happened, whatever veneer true believers want to put over it.
How do you know that? (Asking for information)
“The big turn came Monday into Tuesday, when investors were dumping anything American. Stocks and bonds, including supersafe U.S. government debt, sold off in tandem. The dollar plunged. A trader for Citigroup said global investors became concerned and started to sell U.S. government bonds. “
From WSJ, April 11, 2025, article “Wall Street’s Best Hope to End Trump’s Global Trade War Is One of Its Own”
The national media has covered in great detail the events of Wednesday (the drop in stocks, the rise in the US bonds yield, Trump’s announcement of the suspension of (most) reciprocal tariffs, the climb in stocks). Unfortunately I don’t have links or article names. The stories in publications such as the WSJ and even the NYT were very similar and straightforward, because Trump, Bessent and other officials were quite candid and open. Of course they claimed that it was as planned all the way, but Bessent was the one who insisted on pointing to the unexpected bond yield response and apparently Trump has a lot of experience with that type of issue from his NYC real estate days, so he reacted quickly.
The key factor was not the stock market drop which would not be surprising in a beginning of a recession, but the rise in the bond yield from below 4% to 4.5%. In a nutshell, what that means is that investors worldwide were losing confidence in the US bonds, which are supposed to be the ultimate cover when the stock market craters. If that continued it could have led to the collapse of the economy, which sits on tens of trillions in debt (bonds).
There are two articles today that summarize what happened in this respect: “The Simple Explanation for This Week’s Treasury Market Mayhem”, April 11 in WSJ and “‘This is Not Normal’: Trump’s Tariffs Upend the Bond Market”, April 11 in the NYT. Of course, everything in the NYT is to be used with extreme caution, but again, what happened to the US bond yields and what role that played in Trump’s decision doesn’t appear to be in any way controversial.
I don't feel any "whiplash" at all. People who lose their minds over short-term fluctuations in the stock market are fools.
People who mistake short-term market fluctuations as indicative of the soundness of long-term trade policy make the above seem like geniuses.
"Liberation Day, (Niall Ferguson) says, is nothing short of the unraveling of the American Empire."
Getting tired of Free Press pedants from Britain (no longer great) lecturing US.
I have also noticed that the European mindset on Trump and everything he is doing is quite interesting. It's why they are not Americans.
Britain, yes, but also thoughtful commentators in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, throughout the EU - well, the list goes on. Surely they can’t *all* be wrong? 🤔
Agreed. Commentators from outside the US are more likely to be attuned to the political and cultural climate in those countries that are the targets of the tariffs. How often do you hear about that on American news media, regardless of the political leaning of the media source?
He's spectacularly wrong about a good many things in that interview. It's hard to know where to begin. But I would suggest that a year or two from now, some enterprising person @ TFP might want to dig this interview up, and provide analysis on what he got wrong, and what he got right. I expect it won't be balanced in the least.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that Niall Ferguson has ever gone 5,000 words without predicting the end of the "American Empire", whatever that is.
He's like the Cubs with their billy goat, though the Cubs, indeed, eventually won another World Series. When there's a 1/30 chance of an event every year, you might live to see it.
On the other hand, there isn't a 1/30 chance of our empire dying in any given year.
Trump has identified that China has been waging economic war on the US for at least a decade. Not responding is far more dangerous than trying to address the problem.