High-stakes negotiations between the world’s two superpowers in Switzerland. Big league drama. Serious faces. Solemn handshakes. People arranged by rank staring at each other across long tables.
You can cut the tension — and the chocolate cake — with a knife. It’s almost as if a reality TV show host became President of the United States and he’s taking his foreign policy cues from Hollywood films.
Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer will meet He Lifeng in Geneva on Saturday for a preliminary chat about easing the trade war. Don’t get too excited. The odds of anything meaningful coming out of the meeting are apparently low. Bessent told Fox that one goal of the preliminary dialogue is determining “what to talk about.”
Shades of Chris Tucker. (“Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?!” “Mr. Secretary, you’ll need to speak through the interpreter.” “Oh, ok. Well tell him to tell He that Donald Trump’s sick and tired of being raped by Gina.” “Who’s Gina?” “Sorry, I was reading directly from TruthSocial. China.”)
In the same remarks to Fox, Bessent said his “sense” is that the talks will be about “de-escalation” in what he (correctly) described as “the equivalent of an embargo.” I’ve said this repeatedly, and so has everyone else with any sense about them: Triple-digit tariffs applied across-the-board aren’t just unsustainable, they’re asinine. There can’t, and therefore won’t, be any trade under such conditions, which is why we’ve already seen any number of formal and informal exceptions and exemptions from both sides.
If your wondering whether that means this whole thing was a farce from the get-go, the answer’s obviously “yes.” Trump declared a trade embargo with China without any plan for what to do next. Because of course he did. Consider the source. This is a strategy devised by a guy who, just days after praying over the Pope’s corpse, posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pontiff and had the official White House social media accounts promote it across the internet. (Take a minute to linger on that.)
“We don’t want to decouple,” Bessent went on, in the same interview with American state television. “What we want is fair trade.”
What China wants — and if you ask me, this is reasonable — is for the Trump administration to act like adults. That’s a precondition for any talks beyond this weekend’s proceedings. “Any negotiation must be carried out with mutual respect and in the interest of mutual benefit,” China said. Trump’s team, Beijing insisted, has to “show sincerity.”
I’m the furthest thing from a flag-waving patriot. In fact, I once tried (unsuccessfully) to have an HOA CC&R amended to include a neighborhood flag ban on the grounds flags are intolerably tacky. But I’m embarrassed for my country now, and on a daily basis.
Here’s China, a totalitarian country run by a scheming cabal of communists on democratic days and by a murderous tyrant on all the others, imploring the leaders of the world’s most successful democracy to at least pretend to be something other than petulant children, and not even so much in the interest of advancing trade negotiations, but just in the interest of not embarrassing themselves in Geneva.
China also rolled out the usual, boilerplate rhetoric about “meeting halfway,” and addressing differences with due consideration for each other’s circumstances. Separately, a Commerce Ministry spokesman said Beijing’s decision to engage Trump was based on a “full consideration of global expectations, China’s interests, and the appeals of US industries and consumers.”
I suppose it’s reasonable to expect that Trump will unilaterally lower tariffs on China in the not-so-distant future citing — I don’t know — “respect for my good friend Xi,” or something else absurd when what he really means is, to quote Bessent, “this isn’t sustainable.”
But make no mistake: This is going to drag on forever, and it’s going to be absolutely maddening. For traders. For investors. For Americans. For Chinese. For the whole world. This’ll be the same daily soap opera it was during Trump’s first term, only broadcast on TruthSocial instead of Twitter (may the bird rest in peace).
Trump will be on his social media platform removing tariffs, putting them back on, lowering them, raising them, ranting, raving and just generally manifesting the traits of someone whose brain stopped developing at 14 on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And it’ll go on for more or less the entirety of his second term, just like it consumed most of his first term.
I’d quip that “the ratings will be tremendous,” but they won’t. Sober people hate this. So do Republicans. (See what I did there?)
A deal will come quickly! Just look at Japan, for instance.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/05/07/economy/tariff-negotiations-impasse/
Sure, especially since Trump saying today he’s not going to pull back tariffs to enable talks – path to rapid resolution clear as mud.
Word. Though things may develop rapidly just because everyone wants to put an end of the madness. The question is, will Drumpf sit still or conjure up more drama to inflict upon a hapless world?
Given the SNAP and Medicaid cuts about to pass effectively unopposed by the nullified 2nd branch, I foresee somehow a replaying of the tragic economy my grandparents grew up in. Those that don’t learn from history are sure as hell repeating it. We’re entering this reliant on a generation that literally can’t even read a book.
Lift to S&P 500 on first high-level US-China trade talks is distinctly minor. Perhaps investors are finally getting to the “fool me ten times, shame on me” realization.
What’s the big announcement?
That’s what I’m wondering. It got a brief mention during coverage of Mark Carney’s visit, but I haven’t seen anything elsewhere. Trump told the press there was going to be a huge announcement–possibly the biggest thing ever–coming soon on “a certain subject” (unspecified). He said it would be either Thursday, Friday, or Monday. Obviously not this weekend. He didn’t become president so he could work weekends.
Now of course you have to ignore the hyperbole. With Trump, everything’s the biggest thing ever, so it could be just an updated version of the gold sneakers going on sale. It could be pretty much anything. But Trump certainly seems to think it will be big and important and people will be excited, so for now we’re just left to speculate.
It’s fun to speculate.
Next, it’s time to find out how Trump reacts when the Fed holds rates steady instead of cutting. Here too, I’m speculating. Perhaps Trump really doesn’t plan to fire Powell, wanting him in place as a convenient scapegoat for the recession he knows is coming. Perhaps that’s the big announcement: his lawyers and advisers having cobbled together something resembling a “cause” for which to fire Powell. Who f>cking knows?
The big announcement was leaked this morning, he’s going to call the Persian Gulf the ‘Arabian Gulf’ in another shameless nod to his Saudi benefactors (and a typical Trumpian insult to Iran while in the midst of negotiating with them) while he’s on his Mideast glory trip next weekend.
That’s it? Surely that can’t be all there is to it.
When I moved out to the Gulf (the Persian/Arabian one, not the Mexican/American one) in 1980, I was summoned to the Dubai office of the Ministry of Information to discuss items in my shipment of household goods. A book entitled, “The Persian Gulf” was deemed offensive. I humbly apologized for the common American usage and offered to turn it over to them if it would help me clear the rest of the container. They decided that honor had been satisfied, gave me the book and everything else, and sent me on my way.
He’s teasing a trade deal now.
This is all a cruel joke. Pin the tail on the bad guy.
I can take a page out of my Commemorative Trump Coloring book and resolve this trade war in 24 hours. I call it the FoxConn and am guessing (hoping) we are about to see a lot of it, as opposed to hundreds of billions of dollars of tariff riches. I mean what kind of trade deals are we even negotiating? What is our concession? The removal of batshit tariff rates pulled out of a busy executive’s diaper and the “promise” not to reinstate them for “a time” — say, about two weeks for starters?
China, among many others, are underscoring once again that there is no negotiating with a compromised, uninformed and petulant bullshitter who holds himself above everyone else (with the possible exception of Putin). So what do you do? Don’t negotiate. Just bullshit! Just like FoxConn did in Wisconsin (and many others have done since) – promise him the moon and the stars and a gloating press conference, then give him one of his arm wrestle handshakes and move on. Buy a couple planes, some LNG or an open parcel to make it look good, then let the deal drift off into the ether with all of Mar-A-Lardo’s other imaginings. By the time he realizes you’ve reneged, he’ll have his hands full with election fraud, transgender sports, and renaming geographic features. Trade war over.
Ukraine has definitely triangulated their way to this strategy. “You want half of our mineral rights in perpetuity? Suuuuure, just show us where to sign, we’ll definitely be honoring that. Just as soon as we start mining operations back up in Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia.”
Chris Tucker classic – as you read the words you hear the voice ??