More Chinese companies in the US are transferring their profits back home as tensions between Washington and Beijing escalate to the threshold of an all-out trade war, according to a recent survey by a non-profit organisation representing Chinese enterprises in America... The CGCC-USA results dovetail with new data released by Rhodium Group, a consultancy that tracks investment flows between China and the US. The value of Chinese investments in the US in the first five months of 2018 dropped by 92 per cent, year-on-year, to US$1.8 billion, according to a Rhodium report published on Wednesday.
Trump claims to care about the bilateral balance. Yet trade with Canada is basically balanced. Look at the U.S. data on trade in goods, or on trade in goods and services. There are other, much more obvious targets** ... Share Trump claims to care about U.S. manufacturing. Yet, Canada is one the rare countries where the U.S. runs a substantial surplus in manufactures... In fact, the U.S. increasingly imports energy and other resources from Canada in exchange for manufactures. And since a lot of Canada’s oil is “trapped” by the Rocky mountains and has no signficant outlet to global markets without traversing the U.S. pipeline network, the U.S. gets that oil on really good terms too. (Check out exhibit 17b of the annual trade release. The average price of oil imports from Canada in 2017 was in the low 40s, well below global benchmarks — helping to keep the overall U.S. oil import price down).
O Canada | Council on Foreign Relations
The president of the Atlanta Fed said Monday that concerns about trade may have thwarted the benefits of tax reform in terms of getting businesses to invest Raphael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta Fed, said the trade concerns aren’t so high as to get businesses to scrap the projects they’re currently working on. But they are enough to get them to be hesitant about the future.
That would force any country trying to go after Trump to get creative with their response. Scott Gilmore, a social entrepreneur and former Canadian diplomat, suggested in Maclean's that Canada should use anti-corruption laws to pressure Trump on trade. Trump-branded skyscrapers in Toronto and Vancouver represent the president's most prominent business ventures in the country. "I propose that instead of taxing the import of American serviettes, we tax Trump," Gilmore said. "In the spirit of the Magnitsky Act, Canada and the western allies come together to collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this President: his family and their assets."
Can America's allies target Trump's businesses in response to tariffs? - Business Insider