"None of This Is Real"; "Everyone Gets Their Armistice"
Tuesday, December 17, 2019 18:09
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“None of This Is Real”
by David Stockman
“For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.
– Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890)
“Things are starting to shift to holiday gear, which should lend an even greater sense of unreality to what’s happening in this country right now. Let’s just call it the Era of Fake Everything and be done with it… please.
We’re about 127 months into a Fake Recovery. And post offices are packed with shoppers-cum-shippers rushing to get their gifts in the right hands at the right time. The Fake Market is at new all-time highs, giving even greater cheer to one slice of America, pushed up by easy-to-please politicos and their eager-to-please monetary central planners. We can’t get out of here without mentioning the Fake Impeachment – is it Russiagate or Ukrainegate?
To all that we can now add a Fake Deal to “end” the Donald’s very real, infinitely destructive Trade War. The content-free “Fact Sheet” issued by the U.S. Trade Representative last Friday is a giant Trump campaign billboard positioned for farm-state consumption. And the Tweeter-in-Chief’s claim that American farmers will “very soon” be shipping $50 billion per year of agricultural exports to China and that they’ll need to rush out and buy bigger tractors is bound to generate some attention. But it is – plainly – out-of-this-world crazy.
Even if the Chinese make a legitimate effort to comply – and, as Chris Scott intimates below in his Tuesday dispatch on U.S.-China relations – we’d be lucky to ship $28 billion per year to China by 2021. We actually did reach that level way back in 2013… but it imploded to just $13 billion last year amid this “easy to win” conflict… Here’s Chris with a brief reality check as we head into the festive season all over the world…”
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“Everyone Gets Their Armistice”
By Chris Scott
“Stock markets, China, and the Donald got what they wanted when our Tweeter-in-Chief announced last Friday the completion of a “very large Phase One Deal with China.” The news was enough to lift U.S. stocks to new all-time highs to start this week, eliminating what remained the biggest risk to global markets between now and the 2020 election. This essentially gets us back to where we’ve been several times over the past two years, with China promising to buy American commodities and the Trump administration cancelling additional tariffs and rolling back some existing ones.
Plus ça Change: As I noted last week, the phase one deal means stocks go up, but the U.S. loses its leverage in negotiations to get Beijing to play fair. Since it’s pretty clear that “Tariff Man” wanted this to keep the economy going strong for campaigning purposes, Xi Jinping and his cadres will have zero pressure to follow through on even the meager promises in this trade deal lite before next November.
The Donald insisted that China has agreed to “many structural changes.” They didn’t. What his trade officials said was that Beijing shook hands on better enforcing intellectual property protections on scout’s honor. But Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen made it clear in a public announcement that it would be “at China’s own pace.” The bottom line is that it allows Trump to shore up his “greatest economy ever!” case just as the 2020 campaign season heats up. Meanwhile, China can stall for time as it tries to restructure toward a domestic-consumer-focused/high-tech-manufacturing-oriented economy.
Wait for It… With trade tensions on pause for the foreseeable future, we’ll have to keep our eye out for how the other fronts in the U.S.-China great power versus rising power confrontation could blow up.
That question tends to get particularly interesting over the Christmas holiday, when top Chinese officials test limits as America’s leaders and news outlets spend time with family. Indeed, the latest Chinese war games in the South China Sea may be a preview of what to expect in the next several weeks. “Different from last year’s drills conducted for early warning reconnaissance, these exercises were much longer, and were in a confrontational mode from the start, placing an emphasis on night-time training,” one Chinese commander said, according to a report in the People’s Liberation Army Daily.
Buckle up. The trade truce is upon us for the time being. But it is far, far from an end to U.S.-China tensions.”
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/12/none-of-this-is-real-everyone-gets.html
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