90 deals in 90 days

 Current count: 0

During the weeks leading up to a visit from Japan’s chief trade negotiator, the White House dropped hints it was closing in on a deal.

[...]

And yet Ryosei Akazawa, Japan‘s economic revitalization minister, has gone home without an agreement in place—telling local media he had urged the Americans to reconsider their “extremely regrettable” action.

Moreover, Japan’s prime minister said only yesterday he still has “grave concerns” about some of the policies announced by the Oval Office.

[...]

Such resistance from Tokyo is at odds with the message coming out of the White House, with President Trump saying “big progress” has been made in talks with Japan.

  Fortune

I wouldn't have expected him to say anything else.

Likewise Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump was “totally in the driver’s seat” when it came to tariff negotiations, and that meetings with more than 75 countries trying to cut a deal were “back to back.”

LOL Nutlick.

Investors are losing confidence in the U.S. dollar this week [...] wrote Thierry Wizman and Gareth Berry, rates strategists at Macquarie, in a note seen by Fortune.

“Many observers, including ourselves, had pointed to Japan as an early test case for an early deal,” the duo said. “And yet, the bilateral negotiations between the U.S. and Japan ended without the contours of a deal in place late last week.

[...]

And while America, the world’s largest economy, might be squeezing its allies toward a deal, there are other pressures shaping the global response to Trump’s administration.

Notably, China warned yesterday that any countries working against its interests would be punished.

And China is much more trustworthy than Trump.

“What’s made matters worse is that Japan’s prime minister … is facing upper house elections on July 20 (notably, after the end of the 90-day tariff reprieve). That may be forcing him to avoid seeming conciliatory to the U.S., until the elections are over,” the analysts added.

[...]

“The U.S.’s trading partners may try to run the clock out on Trump, thinking that concessions from the U.S. will be easier to come by as a U.S. slowdown deepens. The process, we expect, will be long and drawn out.”

After weeks of bluster and escalation, President Trump blinked. Then he blinked again. And again.

He backed off his threat to fire the Federal Reserve chairman. His Treasury secretary, acutely aware that the S&P 500 was down 10 percent since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, signaled he was looking for an offramp to avoid an intensifying trade war with China.

And now Mr. Trump has acknowledged that the 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods that he announced just two weeks ago are not sustainable. He was prompted in part by the warnings of senior executives from Target and Walmart and other large American retailers that consumers would see price surges and empty shelves for some imported goods within a few weeks.

[...]

He entered this trade war imagining a simpler era in which imposing punishing tariffs would force companies around the world to build factories in the United States.

  NYT

In so many, many matters, it's increasingly obvious that Trump is living in the past.

. Trump’s aides insist that his maximalist demands have been an act of strategic brilliance, forcing 90 countries to line up to deal with the president. It may take months, they acknowledge, to see the concessions that will result.

[...]

“Have some patience and you will see,” the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Wednesday.

Well, she's just stupid. What's the other folks' excuse?

“We have a lot of action going on,” [Trump] said, repeating his now-familiar line that “we’re not going to be a laughingstock that got taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world.” He suggested again that the United States needed to return to the halcyon era from 1870 to 1913 — the year the country began to impose income taxes — when tariffs funded the government and “we had more money than anybody.”

FFS, the world is nothing like it was at the turn of the 20th century. We're a quarter of the way through the 21st.

And he repeated his prediction that “now we’re going to be making money with everyone, and everyone’s going to be happy.”

Two weeks, right?

But the president was clearly concerned about the warnings from economists that the country could be headed to recession — one of his own making, one that his critics are already trying to label the Trump Slump even before it happens.

I won't know if they're talking about his economic policy or the way he walks.

The tone of his comments seemed to suggest that if recession does come, the blame will fall on Mr. Powell.

And Joe Biden. Certainly won't be Trump's fault.

But once Mr. Trump declared “if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me,” another market sell-off began. It made little difference that he doesn’t have the power to dismiss the Fed chair, as Mr. Powell has noted in recent days. The mere threat of it seemed to accelerate the sense that the United States has become the biggest source of market instability in the world.

The sense? It's just a fact.

Then, on Tuesday, Mr. Trump changed his tune. “I have no intention of firing him,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Powell. That didn’t stop him from continuing his critique of Mr. Powell as “Mr. Late” with rate cuts, but it was enough to reverse the market sell-off.

The next walk-back came with China.

The White House kept hinting that the Chinese were beginning to negotiate, seeking a way to end the tariffs. In fact, the strategy that Beijing appeared to be following was to wait for Mr. Trump to feel the pain of his own actions. The expected phone call from President Xi Jinping never came. And Mr. Trump didn’t want to be the first to call, either — a sign of desperation.

[...]

Trump seemed to expect China to be among the first to come begging for relief, given the size of its exports to the United States.

[...]

By late Tuesday Mr. Trump was publicly mulling lowering the Chinese tariffs, saying “145 percent is very high, and it won’t be that high, not going to be that high.” He added, “It got up to there,” as if the number had floated to that height by itself.

[...]

“Let me be clear: There will be no unilateral reduction in tariffs against China,” Ms. Leavitt said on Fox News.

She just keeps being willing to be made a fool of. She should ask all of his previous communications spokespeople about that.

[T]he Trump team appeared to have ignored three fundamentals about China: the depth of the Chinese retaliatory tool kit, the extent of China’s economic leverage over the United States, and the ability of Mr. Xi to make the United States the scapegoat for China’s economic ills, [Elizabeth Economy, who has written extensively about Chinese trade policy and served in the Commerce Department during the Biden administration, said].

Yeah, that's her name. She didn't make it up, either.

UPDATE 08:27 pm:

Pathetic.