Tag: Trump tariffs

Janet Yellen: The US-China trade war isn’t over and a tech fight risks dividing the world

HONG KONG (CNN Business) — The United States’ trade war with China is far from over, according to Janet Yellen, who is warning that unresolved tensions over technology could divide the world and slow the development of artificial intelligence and 5G.

The former chair of the Federal Reserve said Monday at the Asian Financial Forum that the “phase one” trade deal agreement struck by Washington and Beijing and due to be signed this week will leave tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods in place. And it doesn’t remove the “more troublesome” risk of conflict over emerging technologies, she warned.

Beijing and Washington will finalize the initial trade deal on Wednesday, according to President Donald Trump. China is sending its top trade negotiator to participate in the signing ceremony at the White House. Continue reading.

Phase 1 trade deal stops bleeding, doesn’t end U.S.-China dispute: U.S. Chamber

BEIJING (Reuters) – The Phase 1 trade deal to be signed this week by China and the United States “stops the bleeding” but does not end the trade war, a senior U.S. Chamber of Commerce official said on Monday, warning that significant challenges remain.

Myron Brilliant, the chamber’s Executive Vice President, told a media briefings in the Chinese capital that there is “clearly a sigh of relief from both sides” with the agreement, expected to be signed on Wednesday in Washington, and that the depth of the Phase 1 was more positive than initially thought.

“Implementation of Phase 1 will be important to building trust and certainty, building off the success of the negotiation,” said Brilliant, who said he had been briefed on the text of the accord but not seen it. Continue reading.

Trump’s Trade War Cost Wisconsin 800 Dairy Farms

The state of Wisconsin, famous for its cheese, lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019, Dairy Herd Management reported on Thursday. The loss of 818 dairies was the largest decline in Wisconsin history.

Trouble for dairy farmers started in 2018, when Donald Trump engaged in a protracted trade war with China. In retaliation for increased tariffs from the United States, China placed tariffs on a number of U.S. agricultural exports.

As a result, exports of U.S. dairy to China dropped by more than 50 percent in 2019, according to CNBC. Continue reading.

‘Trump money’: Americans appear unconcerned as trade war makes US farmers desperately reliant on billions in government assistance

AlterNet logoWith tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration causing U.S. farmers to suffer major financial hardships, the Administration addressed their woes in 2019 by providing billions of dollars in subsidies. And farmers are hoping that additional farming assistance will be authorized in 2020.

Journalist Dino Rabouin, in a January 6 article for Axios, explains, “Farmers had a rough 2019, even with a hefty subsidy package provided to them by the Trump Administration as relief from the trade war. Chapter 12 bankruptcies rose 24% over the previous year, and farm debt is projected to hit a record high $416 billion.”

Those subsidies, Rabouin stresses, were desperately needed by U.S. farmers in 2019. Continue reading.

New Research Exposes Costs And Lies Of Trump’s Trade War

Two new economic working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research shared on Monday revealed the sweeping impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade war and undercut his repeated claims about his policies’ supposed benefits.

Trump has repeatedly said, for instance, that the costs of his tariffs — which are just taxes on U.S. imports — are paid entirely by foreign governments and firms, rather than by Americans. But a paper by researchers Mary Amiti of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen J. Redding of Princeton University, and David Weinstein of Columbia University directly rebuts that claim.

The authors noted that initial research had pointed to the fact that Americans were bearing the burden of the tariffs in 2018, when Trump’s aggressive trade tactics were initially enacted. But it wasn’t clear, they said, whether this would continue as the tariffs persisted. Continue reading.

How Trump’s trade war is making lobbyists rich — and devastating small businesses

AlterNet logoMike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.

“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”

Elrod also thought that big businesses had long been able to buy their way out of problems, either by spending lots of money on compliance or on lobbyists to look for loopholes and apply political pressure. Trump, of course, had promised to address that — to “drain the swamp.” Continue reading.

Railroads are slashing workers, cheered on by Wall Street to stay profitable amid Trump’s trade war

Washington Post logoROANOKE — Jeff Hollandsworth was told to do something recently that he had never done before in his many years working for Norfolk Southern Railway: Empty lockers.

Norfolk Southern has let more than 3,500 employees go in the past year, including 175 in Roanoke, part of an aggressive push across the railroad industry to slash costs.

As Hollandsworth cut the locks and removed his former co-workers’ coats, hats, power tools and hefty company rule books, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the layoffs were different this time. Unlike in the past, his colleagues probably won’t be coming back. Continue reading.

With Trump’s farm bailout came surprising profits, but little help for the neediest

Washington Post logoIn 2019, the farm belt felt about as hospitable as the asteroid belt. Record rainfall turned fields to sludge and made it nigh on impossible to plant corn and soybeans until long after the typical window had passed. President Trump’s long-running trade war cut off farmers’ access to China’s enormous market. Across the farm sector, commodity prices remained in the doldrums.

Yet the Agriculture Department now estimates 2019 was farmers’ most profitable in five years. What happened?

Three words: Market Facilitation Program. Or, as it’s more commonly known, the farm bailout. Continue reading

US Steel to shutter Detroit plant and lay off 1,545 workers after Trump brags he ‘saved’ industry

AlterNet logoU.S. Steel Corp. plans to permanently idle a giant plant in the Detroit area and lay off up to 1,545 workers as steelmakers face large financial losses despite President Donald Trump’s boasts that he “saved” the steel industry.

U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt praised Trump’s tariffs on imported steel after the company announced it would rehire workers and restart two blast furnaces last year. Earlier this year, Trump bragged that he “not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs” with his steel tariffs.

Just months later, U.S. Steel announced that it would idle a plant outside of Detroit and lay off as many as 1,545 employees, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The company already laid off 200 Michigan workers earlier this year.

Continue reading

Trump’s top economic aide just made a stunning admission about the president’s dealings with China

AlterNet logoWhite House Director of Economic Policy Larry Kudlow made a stunning admission on Wednesday as he was discussing President Donald Trump’s trade negotiations with China.

Eamon Javers, a CNBC journalist covering the economy, reported on the remarks Kudlow made to a group of reporters. Kudlow said that Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s former secretary of State, had recently been to the White House — and he has also recently met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping twice.

“I asked if Kissinger is playing a back channel role in trade talks,” Javers said. Continue reading