Trump was so emboldened by openly-accepted Russian election rigging that he recently coerced the Ukraine President into investigating his Democratic political opponent. That's what happens when corruption is left unchecked in a Banana Republican government. Be that as it may, impeachment is merely a slap on the wrist in a country as politically polarized as the U.S. Therefore it will be left to the markets to render final verdict on the MAGA Kingdom.
Like a hammer to the head.
Trump knows this full well, which is why he's tweeting 80 times a week in order to keep the Dow from final exploding. His fallback Twitter position is to claim that a trade deal is just around the corner. Something we've heard for 18 months now. Herein lies the problem for Trump - a trade deal is no longer going to cut it. If he wanted a mere trade deal he could have had one many times over by now. What he needs is a trade war victory, because anything less will be viewed as a political loss and an abject waste of time and money. Unfortunately, China will in no way hand Trump an outright trade war victory, as they view the terms as existentially unacceptable. They are fully ready and willing to drag this out until the election, thereby squeezing Trump under the growing weight of a flagging economy.
Yesterday at the United Nations, like clockwork, Trump turned the heat back up in the trade war. Publicly bashing Beijing just days ahead of the country's seventieth anniversary.
"The comments came during Trump’s long section on China, in which he accused the country of stealing America’s jobs and intellectual property and of stingily refusing to sign a long-sought trade deal with the US. It’s therefore no surprise Trump lumped in Hong Kong to further bash Beijing."
Which means his new comments could open up a further fissure between America and China"
The seeds of this disaster were sown decades ago with the conservative obsession over "Free trade". A mass delusion that Trump's own economic advisor Larry Kudlow supported right up until he got his new job. A failed policy that Trump has fully repudiated. Because in the end it was all merely industrial arbitrage to amplify corporate profit. Without free trade, corporate profits would be a fraction of their current level and U.S. wages would be substantially higher, as they are for example in Germany. The problem was that the U.S. is the only country in the world that actually ever believed in free trade - Japan, China, Germany, India, the Asian Tigers, are all trade Mercantilists:
"Mercantilism is a national economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports, and minimize the imports, of a nation. These policies aim to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus. Mercantilism includes a national economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods"
And yet, somehow the prevailing belief among all modern economists is that Mercantilism no longer exists, because it died out decades or even centuries ago. As we didn't learn in 2008, these people are not highly intelligent and even less honest, because the inconvenient fact is that mercantilism remains the prevailing economic ideology today. In a fiat-currency based global economy, what is now valued are not currency reserves, what is prized above all else is technology leadership and the high paying value-added jobs that go along with it. As opposed to burrito assembly lines.
The dangerously delusional belief among Trump acolytes is that the U.S. can't lose the trade war, because China is the sole beneficiary of this imbalanced trading relationshiop:
“This is about shifting the supply chain back to the U.S.”
This naive view ignores the capital flowing into the U.S. to fund Trump profligacy, and it ignores the profits flowing into corporate coffers. Somehow, this never-ending trade war has morphed from a concern over trade deficits a year ago, to a 5g Wireless Tech war earlier this year, to existentional hegemonic control over the planet now.
Sadly, yet inevitably, the workers getting hurt the most are the ones these Keystone Kops say they're trying to protect.
"Friday's jobs report represented another SOS from the manufacturing sector, hard hit by the trade war and slowing global demand. Already in a recession, manufacturers added just 3,000 jobs in August"
"The president came into office offering the hope that we'd see a resurgence of manufacturing in the United States. Now manufacturing is in trouble, and the reasons include trade disputes and tariffs"
