Economist: How America could end up making China great again, beating US since Trump launch the trade war during his first term. 經濟學家：自從川普第一任期發動貿易戰以來，美國如何最終讓中國再次偉大，擊敗美國.
Despite all this, China enters the new age of MAGA stronger than in Mr Trump’s first term. President Xi Jinping has long argued that America is too polarised and overstretched to sustain its global role. One of his slogans warns of “great changes unseen in a century”. His paranoid nationalism used to seem like dystopian hyperbole. Now that Mr Trump is committing such wanton self-harm and general destruction, it looks ahead of its time.
President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc
F YOU failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.
Mr Trump called it one of the most important days in American history. He is almost right. His “Liberation Day” heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order and embrace of protectionism. The question for countries reeling from the president’s mindless vandalism is how to limit the damage.
On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests—and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the G7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers—like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.
And Mr Trump’s grasp of the technicalities was pathetic. He suggested that the new tariffs were based on an assessment of a country’s tariffs against America, plus currency manipulation and other supposed distortions, such as value-added tax. But it looks as if officials set the tariffs using a formula that takes America’s bilateral trade deficit as a share of goods imported from each country and halves it—which is almost as random as taxing you on the number of vowels in your name.
Business Blog 