06-30-2018, 12:12 AM
“There’s no question that China is preparing for a trade war,” Edward Alden, a trade scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. China is currently planning on placing tariffs on $34 billion worth of US goods in response to Trump’s plan to hit $34 billion in Chinese goods with tariffs next week. Beijing is attempting to dissuade Trump from considering additional tariffs in the future by matching the scale of the US’s first batch of them. While China and its Asian trading partners began to work on an agreement before the recent escalations in trade tensions between the US and China, analysts say the timing of the announcement is politically charged. China’s plan to impose tariffs on soybeans is going to hit the US hard. China buys about a third of the US’s soybean exports, making it far and away the largest importer in the world for the American crop. The biggest soybean producers in the US include Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana — states in the heart of Trump country where neither the president nor his party wants to see economic instability or job losses in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, or the 2020 elections.
It sure looks like China’s preparing for a trade war with the US - Vox
And Harley is one of the companies feeling an immediate squeeze: It’s paying more for its raw materials even as it faces the prospect of tariffs on the cycles it exports. Given that squeeze, it’s perfectly natural for the company to move some of its production overseas, to locations where steel is still cheap and sales to Europe won’t face tariffs. So Harley’s move is exactly what you’d expect to see given Trump policies and the foreign response. But while it’s what you’d expect to see, and what I’d expect to see, it’s apparently not what Trump expected to see. Think about it. Imagine that you’re Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, who has already been telling leaders of multinational corporations that he plans to “punch back” against Trump’s tariffs. How do you feel seeing Trump squealing over a few hundred jobs possibly lost in the face of European retaliation? Surely the spectacle inclines you to take a hard line: If such a small pinprick upsets Trump so much, the odds are pretty good that he’ll blink in the face of real confrontation.