The first deal to be announced was UK. Trump, Lutnick, Bessent, and others gave an announcement in the WH with the ambassador from the UK present and Comrade Starmer on speaker phone.
The final deal needs to be hammered out, but the basics were laid out.
added: Habemus Papam! Leo XIV, the first American pope
Wall Street Journal seems to have turned into a Donald Administration critic with today’s editorial delivering a scathing analysis of Trump’s evolving trade policy. I’d pay big money to be in the situation room listening to the discussions. Is it as ad hoc as it seems and is Miran with his Mar-a-Lago plan totally out of his depth?
Trump Stages a Trade-War Retreat - WSJ
“President Trump continues to walk back his trade war by degrees, and markets continue to cheer. That’s the big story in Thursday’s announcement that the U.S. and the United Kingdom have struck a new trade deal.”
Trump is doing exactly what was expected. He put on stringent tariffs and told countries that if they wanted the tariffs reduced or even removed, they had to make a deal.
The UK has made a deal, and in return the UK gets to sell about 100k cars a year with a 10% tariff. That’s about the same number of cars as they sell now.
It was never about tariffs, it was about trade. Tariffs are a means to an end.
And you keep saying Miran. His job seems to be to collate economic data for the administration.
The players for trade are Trump himself, Bessent (Treasury), Lutnick (Commerce), Jamieson Greer (Trade Representative), Peter Navarro (senior counselor for trade and manufacturing to the president), Brooke Rollins (Agriculture) and Kevin Hassett (director of the National Economic Council).
Larry Kudlow had Hassett’s current job in Trump 1.0.
This is a screenshot from the announcement yesterday.
Lutnick and Vance are on the left, the UK ambassador and Greer are on the right.
The woman with her back to us in the foreground on the right is Rollins.
added: during the meeting Lutnick said that an (at the time) unnamed British airline had agreed to purchase $10billion of Boeing planes as part of the UK-US trade deal.
Today we learned that British Airways had agreed to buy 32 Boeing 787-10 jets with GE engines.
Talks are currently underway in Switzerland between U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and a delegation led by Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.
The Chinese have to include their pronouns in their names?
There also seem to be 2 sets of polls, just as there have been in the past several elections. The reasons supposedly include the hostility of the questions and also oversampling of Dems (as happened in the 2016 election when we were told Clinton would win in a landslide)
I’m just citing financial news media that see Miran’s plan as the blueprint of what’s going on.
Anywho, 90 day relief granted. That was quick. Seems like neither China nor the US really felt comfortable with the super duper elevated tariffs.
Long term uncertainty remains, though. The weighted average tariff rate on China is now at 42%, still at an eye watering level. US’s is 33%. Bessent called China’s current WATR as the “floor”. We’ll see how things develop.
Structural tensions remain unresolved.
What a heavy weight matchup we’re witnessing. This is even better than any of Trump’s WWE fight nights.
Watch Donald Trump Take Down WWE’s Vince McMahon Back in 2007 - YouTube
China is now willing to come to the table so they get a 90-day pause like the other countries.
What we’ve got to watch out for is a repeat of the last China deal (the phase 1 trade deal) where China made a lot of undertakings then Biden took over and China never delivered what she had promised. In particular, China was supposed to make large agricultural purchases from the US, but didn’t.
China’s being treated differently to other countries in the sense that Bessent has the China negotiation and Lutnick has the other countries.
There’s been progress on prescription drug prices too. Trump 1.0 did something but it was challenged in court and the Biden administration took the position orange man bad. If Trump succeeds, Americans will pay less than now for drugs and presumably others will have to pay more so that research can still be funded. Although it’s being done for other reasons, it will affect the trade deficit as the US will import a lower dollar amount of prescription drugs and other countries will import a higher dollar amount from the US.
WSJ Editorial took a different take on who did and what:
“Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs—and by Mr. Trump’s own hand. Witness the agreement Monday morning to scale back his punitive tariffs on China—his second major retreat in less than a week.”
As did The Economist’s Intelligence Unit:
“Although this rollback represents a constructive first step, further tariff reductions will be difficult and the risk of renewed escalation persists. China appears to have made minimal concessions to secure deescalation.”
These developments are very interesting to follow and there’s always room for interpretation. But I’ll keep plugging these events into my Bayesian probability calculator and I really hope at some point the verdict isn’t what it is right now: a ship without a captain.
"Although this rollback represents a constructive first step, further tariff reductions will be difficult and the
risk of renewed escalation persists. China appears to have made minimal concessions to secure deescalation”
That’s putting a very negative spin on it.
This was always about the trade deficit not tariffs, and the tariffs were imposed to force other countries to come to the table. No concessions were required to secure deescalation, just a willingness to come to the table. Once countries were prepared to come to the table, the tariffs were paused for 90 days, with the implied threat that the tariffs would be resumed if the talks don’t produce a satisfactory result
The article says “the risk of renewed escalation persists.” That’s the point.
I had to laugh today. The Fed wouldn’t cut interest rates the other week because of tariffs, and now Fed watchers are giving the removal of the tariffs as a reason for the Fed not to cut rates.
(Added: and the headline “Annual inflation rate hit 2.3% in April, less than expected and lowest since 2021”)
Thank you Orange Man for ATH on BTC!!!
There have been more calls for Trump to receive a Peace Nobel, this time for stopping the recent India-Pakistan spat from escalating into nuclear war
British Peer Calls for Trump to Be Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for Preventing India-Pakistan War
A Pakistani-British muslim lord no less.
I’ve lost count of the number of Nobel Peace Prizes Trump should have had.
Blessed are the peacemakers
I liked his speech in Syria where he took jabs at “nation builders” and interventionists, and essentially admitted that the US’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been disastrous since 1970s.
Syria is a hot spot now. I’d like to know how much weight is thrown around behind closed doors. Assad was pushed out and Russia’s influence drastically decreased (yet Russia remained the only one willing to sell oil to Syria, hence Russia kept itself in the game. Now Donald&co are taking huge steps to pull Syria towards the US. What does this all mean for Iran? Could Iran soon also expect sanctions to be lifted?
Syria was a messy many-sided civil war. The sanctions may be lifted if they sign the Abraham Accords and make nice with Israel.
The big winner in Syria is Turkey/Turkiye. We probably came close to WW3 when the Turks shot down that Russian jet over Syria (or maybe just over the border in Turkey), but Russia and Turkey seem to have made up, maybe because Russia is busy in Ukraine. Russia stayed out of the end stages in Syria and also did nothing while Turkey helped Azerbaijan ethnically cleanse Naborno-Karabakh of the majority Armenians.
And yes, the sanctions on Iran could be lifted if Iran is prepared to make big enough concessions. There was a report a week or 2 ago that Israel had been all set to strike Iran which was aborted because Trump wouldn’t back it. The concern was that Iran would retaliate and the US would have to protect Israel, and there’s no appetite among the base for another mid-East war.
Too bad Vladi didn’t give a flying ■■■■ about Donald’s pleas. Maybe calling Vladi crazy will restore Donald’s illusion of authority.
