Major companies across Asia are contacting their container ships and ordering them to change direction. Others are writing off the entire cost of shipments crossing the Pacific. 亞洲各地的大型公司正在聯繫他們的貨櫃船並命令它們改變方向。其他人則取消了穿越太平洋的貨運的全部成本.

Factories in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere are closing assembly lines—and business development teams are fanning out across the world to find new markets.

Some big American buyers are asking producers to lower their prices, and getting no response.

SHORTAGES IN U.S.
Store shelves in the United States are going to have big gaps within weeks—as shortages of household items rise.

And prices will shoot up for whatever stock is left, triggering a jump in inflation that the country can’t afford.

Trump fans are pointing to a partial rebound in some stock markets, not realizing that they were triggered by rising rumours that their hero’s plans were being delayed.

TRUMP HUMILATES WORLD
Meanwhile, the cause of all this trouble remained largely unaware of the trouble he was causing. Every country in the world is “kissing my a**”, Donald Trump said with delight at a fund-raising dinner in Washington on Tuesday night.

Except China, of course.

Which is why he paused tariffs on all his targets, including the penguins and US military bases, except China, which saw Trump taxes lifted about 100%.

Hilariously, the mainstream media cannot bring itself to praise China. The UK Guardian today, incredibly, accused the Chinese of “intransigence”—as if standing up to Trump’s illegal levels of economic coercion was a bad thing.

CHANGE OF COURSE
Why did Trump change course suddenly?

Advisors on Wednesday warned him that they were seeing the steepest fall in US government bond prices in 40 years, indicating a global lack of confidence in the future of the country.
That’s when he knew he had to back down.

But that triggered panic about his image — Trump needed to avoid headlines saying that he was backing down – so he launched a vicious attack on China, a developing nation, to prove that he was still a world-class economic thug.

This is clearly a mistake. China makes products that the US needs, from phones to computers to clothes to shoes to microwaves.

The US consumer cannot manage without these items. And cannot afford to pay a 104% surcharge for them. This will become obvious very soon.

CRUDE SINOPHOBES
Trump’s economic advisors, Peter Navarro and Scott Bessant, have aptly demonstrated that they know less about their subject than the UK’s in-and-out former Prime Minister Liz Truss—which is really saying something.

Both are crude Sinophobes who have come to believe their own myths about the rising nation.

Shaun Rein of the China Market Research Group, who has tried to advise Bessant in the past, said yesterday: “I worry for America. We have one of the most ignorant on China yet arrogant people I’ve ever met running a trade war against China.”