How The Trade War Is Going To Affect You And Your Family

As expected, trade negotiations with China concluded on Friday with no trade deal in sight.  Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called the negotiations “constructive”, and that helped calm the financial markets, but there really isn’t any reason to be optimistic at this point.  The negotiations that happened this week did not even come close to producing a deal, and neither side is attempting to claim that there will be an agreement in the near future.  Instead, it appears that moves are being made that could lead to a protracted trade war.  In fact, according to Bloomberg the Trump administration has just given the Chinese another ominous deadline… (Read More...)

The Deadline Passes And Trump Brings Down The Tariff Hammer – China Immediately Promises To Retaliate

At 12:01 AM eastern time on Friday, President Trump followed through on his threats and hit China with a massive tariff increase.  As you will see below, China immediately pledged to retaliate.  U.S. and Chinese officials will continue to negotiate throughout the day on Friday, but if U.S. officials were optimistic that a deal was imminent the trigger never would have been pulled on these tariffs.  At this point the gap between the negotiating positions of the two sides is still enormous, and that does not seem likely to change.  The Chinese have been taking advantage of the United States for decades, and they wish to continue doing so.  Meanwhile, President Trump and his advisers are absolutely determined to level the playing field.  Unless one of the parties backs down in a major way, there is not going to be a trade agreement and this trade war is about to get very real, and that is extremely bad news for the global economy. (Read More...)

Trump Spooks Global Markets: China “Broke The Deal. They Can’t Do That, So They’ll Be Paying.”

It sure looks like nothing can stop the trade war now, and that could potentially be absolutely disastrous for the global economy.  The last major trade war began in 1930, and it turned an economic downturn into the Great Depression of the 1930s.  But without a doubt something needed to be done about China.  They have been lying, cheating and stealing our technology for a very long time, and previous administrations simply allowed them to walk all over us.  President Trump had hoped that a new trade agreement would put trade between our two nations on a fair and equitable course from now on, but at this point it appears that isn’t going to happen. (Read More...)

If The Stock Market Is Falling This Much Already, What Is Going To Happen If There Is No Trade Deal With China By Friday?

If negotiations between the Trump administration and the Chinese government do not produce a trade deal by Friday, it is going to be absolutely catastrophic for Wall Street.  On Tuesday, trade fears pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 473 points.  It was the second-worst trading day of 2019 so far, and at one point during the trading session the Dow had fallen as much as 648 points.  But most of the experts are assuring investors that a trade deal with China will be finalized before Trump’s new tariffs go into effect on Friday.  We are being told that the Chinese will almost certainly cave in on some of their most important demands and that Trump will get the favorable trade deal with China that he has been seeking. (Read More...)

The Dow Made A Miraculous 400 Point Recovery, But Now Renewed Trade Fears Are Sending Markets Plunging Once Again

If your head is spinning from the wild fluctuations that have shaken global financial markets, you are definitely not alone.  On Sunday, President Trump angrily threatened to hit China with enormous new tariffs, and it looked like hopes for a trade deal between the United States and China had collapsed.  Overnight, Chinese stocks had their worst session in three years, and many expected U.S. stocks to experience a similar plunge.  But then on Monday we learned that the Chinese had decided to move forward with trade talks this week anyway, and global financial markets started rebounding in a major way.  In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded more than 400 points… (Read More...)

Trade talks with China collapse: “This has all the makings of a complete disaster that could lead the stock market to crater this week”

Chaos has returned to global financial markets, and it does not appear that there will be an easy fix this time.  For the first four months of 2019, the mainstream media told us over and over again that a great deal of progress was being made on a trade deal with China and that negotiations would soon reach a final conclusion, but now it has become clear that those news reports were fake news.  For a variety of reasons, the Chinese have been slow playing negotiations all along.  Once they got the Trump administration to suspend the implementation of any new tariffs while negotiations were ongoing, the Chinese no longer had any urgency to reach an agreement.  In fact, if the Chinese could have run out the clock all the way to the 2020 election, they surely would have done so.  They would very much prefer to negotiate with someone else, and I think that President Trump has finally figured out that he was being played.  On Sunday, in a very angry two part tweet Trump announced that he is going to slap China with huge new tariffs… (Read More...)

I Dare You To Tell Me The Economy Is “Booming” After Reading This List Of 19 Facts About Our Current Economic Performance

After taking an honest look at the facts, I don’t know how anyone can possibly claim that the U.S. economy is “booming”.  I really don’t.  We hear this sort of rhetoric from the mainstream media all the time, but it doesn’t make any sense.  As I discussed yesterday, nobody should be using the term “booming” to describe the state of the U.S. economy until we have a full year when GDP growth is 3 percent or better, and at this point we haven’t had that since the middle of the Bush administration.  And as you will see below, the latest numbers are clearly telling us that the U.S. economy is not even moving in the right direction.  Economic conditions are getting worse, and they weren’t that great to begin with.  According to the calculations that John Williams has made over at shadowstats.com, the U.S. economy is already in a recession, but of course the Federal Reserve will continue to tell us that everything is just fine for as long as they possibly can.  Unfortunately for them, they can’t hide the depressingly bad numbers that are coming in from all over the economy, and those numbers are all telling us the same thing. (Read More...)

Top U.S. Officials Gather To Discuss “Military Options” In Venezuela As Russia Warns Of “Grave Consequences” If America Invades

On Wednesday afternoon, senior U.S. officials gathered at the White House to discuss possible military options for Venezuela.  Meanwhile, the Russians are warning of grave consequences if the U.S. invades, and so the stage is being set for a potential showdown between the world’s two foremost military powers.  Previously, administration officials had hoped that the Venezuelan people would rally around Juan Guaido to such a degree that it would not require military intervention to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but that hasn’t happened.  In fact, Guaido’s big push to start a revolution in the streets over the past few days has ended up being a total flop.  The following comes from Yahoo News… (Read More...)

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