President Trump as just announced massive tariffs on Chinese-made products amid moves toward asserting American protectionism:
The White House has announced a 25-percent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods in what it calls a clampdown on unfair trade practices by Beijing.
The US trade representative’s office said it issued a revised China tariff list covering 1,102 separate product categories. The first package of revised tariffs will apply to $34 billion of Chinese imports, on 818 product lines, and will enter into effect from July 6. The second package will target the remaining $16 billion of Chinese goods, on 284 product lines.
Since his presidential election campaign, US President Donald Trump has pledged to cut the trade deficit between the US and China and to curb Beijing’s allegedly unfair trade practices. Trump has also accused China of stealing US technology and intellectual property.
“In light of China’s theft of intellectual property and technology and its other unfair trade practices, the US will implement a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods from China that contain industrially significant technologies,” according to the White House statement.
“This includes goods related to China’s Made in China 2025 strategic plan to dominate the emerging high-technology industries that will drive future economic growth for China, but hurt economic growth for the United States and many other countries.”
The step is expected to escalate trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies. Earlier, Chinese officials warned of mirror measures, pledging to introduce import tariffs on US goods such as automobiles, aircraft, and soybeans.
Beijing said it would swiftly impose retaliatory levies on American imports worth $50 billion. Shortly after China’s warning, the White House threatened tariffs on a further $100 billion of Chinese exports. (source)
Lots of conservatives are hailing Trump’s moves as being GREAT FOR AMERICA and telling THOSE CHINESE WHAT THEIR PLACE IS.
Remember, according to the TRUMP administration, the official policy is “America First, B*tch”.
The reality is that the American consumer is going to be the one who will get destroyed, and in turn this is going to likely eviscerate long-term the already gutted American economy,
Allow me to explain.
It is true that there have been improvements made in terms of employment numbers and then the recent peace deal with North Korea. However, these are not tangible “improvements” in any long-term sense.
America’s economy for the last nearly half-century, starting during the time of the Nixon administration, is based largely upon the important of materials and products from other countries. It is true that such a policy pursued to the ends that it was eviscerated local businesses and manufacturing, to which arose in the ruined shells of former mill towns corporate mega-stores filled with cheaply produced goods imported from overseas.
At the same time, the standard of living which Americans largely enjoy today exists because of this rise. Through the intentional creation of economic “bubbles” using credit manipulation, major banks and industrial groups in combination with intensive advertising were able to seduce many to take out loans from everything to education to construction projects to buying just plain junk because one could buy it.
Again, were it not for this credit manipulation, America would have a lot fewer “developed” areas and a lot more of the country resemble a second-world nation, as it once did during the years leading up to World War I and in the decade thereafter.
This is neither a good or a bad thing. It is just a reality that the unprecidented prosperity enjoyed by millions in the USA is historically abnormal and was engineered for the purpose of debt expansion by the international banking families, such as Morgan, Rockefeller, Warburg and Rothschild, who hold interests in the Federal Reserve Bank. It was the expansion of usury upon usury so as to apply more usury in exchange for promises of an easy and enjoyable life.
The problem is that all of such systems do not historically last more that 40 to 50 years because they are tied to fiat currency, after which through enough debt expansion people lose faith in the credibility of the currency itself to service the debts which people have because they are so massive.
The American Dream film. It is a cartoon that explains well the debt situation.
There are three ways of historically clearing this out. The first is to allow for a “natural” devaluation by the allowing for a recession to happen that could last for many years until an equilibrium is reached. This is likely impossible with the USA because the debt is the largest ever accumulated in human history. The second is for the government to print the money to service its debt, but this would cause an immediate crash followed by a massive hyperinflation in which the currency would lose all value and, just as in Weimar Germany, it would be more valuable to burn dollars for heat than to spend them because they would have no value.
The last option, and the one which Trump seems to be doing at the direction of the individuals in finance and industry, is to apply tariffs so to drive down the US economic condition long-term while entering into a “protectionist” mode, then to blame the ensuing troubles on America’s largest creditor- the Chinese. When such an incident happens, it would then politically speaking be highly convenient if an “attack” should just “happen”- such as a Gulf of Tonkin/Operation Northwoods/9/11 incident- that would give the USA an excuse to militarize for war against the Chinese, thereby allowing the government to write down its debt, re-establish a new currency and fix the rate of the new one as a percentage of the old currency. There would be a minimal decline in value and a small depression, but the ensuing profits coming from the production of arms and goods for war would likely compensate for the value that needed to be sacrificed. This would reset the economy and, in the case of the USA, give her the opportunity to re-assert herself as the world’s reserve currency which she still is today.
It’s not an accident that Trump visited North Korea. It has nothing to do with peace. It has to do with establishing economic and geopolitical circumstances that will give way to a larger war.
Economic warfare always precedes military warfare. Trade wars are what come before wars with bullets and missiles.
The issue now is not so much to stop what is already in place so as it pertains to the common man. It is for the common man to prepare himself for economic strife because more of this is coming in the future. If one does not take care to protect one’s assets, he will find what little he has stolen in the pursuit of wealth by a few at the expense of the many.