Apparently, Steve Mnuchin is still thinking about taking a special trip to Gina sometime relatively soon (or maybe not) to talk about trade because if there’s anyone who is good at taking trips and talking about trade without saying something stupid and pissing everyone off as soon as he steps off the goddamn plane, it’s Steve Mnuchin, right? Right.
“A trip is under consideration,” he told reporters yesterday in Washington at the IMF’s meetings, adding that for the time being, he’s “not going to make a comment on timing, nor do I have anything confirmed.”
In other words, Steve Mnuchin is not planning on taking a trip to China, but if you pressed him, he could think of worse things to do with his time (like maybe hanging out with some poors or cleaning up the literal horse shit someone left on his driveway), and Louise Linton can think of worse things to do with her time (like maybe fucking Steve Mnuchin or decorating by herself), so the Treasury Secretary isn’t going to completely rule it out, especially if not ruling it out means someone will write a story about a “trade truce” which is what Bloomberg and Reuters both did on Sunday.
As Bloomberg details, “a visit by the U.S. Treasury secretary to China could signal a breakthrough in the spat between the world’s two-biggest economies, whose threats to slap tariffs on each other have rattled markets and raised fears of a trade war.”
For their part, China’s Ministry of Commerce said today that they’re “aware that the U.S. is considering a visit to Beijing to negotiate economic and trade issues and welcomes such a move.” I’m not sure “welcome” is the right word, because saying you “welcome” a visit from Steve Mnuchin is to say something so obviously ridiculous that it can’t be taken any semblance of serious, but Beijing probably would “welcome” the opportunity to talk to an actual person, in person, as opposed to indirectly negotiating with Trump’s Twitter feed.
Mnuchin reportedly met with the PBoC’s new governor Yi Gang at the IMF meetings this week to talk about a number of things including issues related to central banking and the Treasury Secretary is said to have expressed his gratitude at China’s latest efforts to pacify that orange monkey in the White House with a new set of measures to open Chinese markets. Mnuchin reiterated his “cautious optimism” about the prospect that Washington and Beijing can come to some kind of amicable agreement that allows the U.S. to extort the Chinese without the situation devolving into an all-out trade war that tanks global markets, but as Bloomberg noted over the weekend, he “declined to offer any details on what an agreement could look like.”
Again, don’t forget that it was less than three months ago when Mnuchin’s Davos broadside sent shockwaves across global markets, and you have to be a special kind of tone deaf to show up in Davos, as Treasury Secretary, and immediately jawbone the dollar lower two days after your boss started slapping tariffs on shit.
So ultimately, I guess the fact that Steve Mnuchin is now being held up as the guy who is going to help avert a global trade war is just further proof that irony is indeed dead in the age of Trump.
On the bright side, at least he can give Yi some pointers on how devaluing the yuan is “good for trade”…
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