Trump-Xi Face Off for All the Marbles in South Korea
Yesterday, the long-awaited head-to-head between Trump and Xi finally took place in South Korea.
The ‘showdown’ between the two superpowers of the United States and China had been culminating for quite some time with Trump’s ‘hardball’ tariff war meant to vassalize China in the same way that had been done to Europe. But as we covered recently, China has cultivated a newborn determination and confidence against its stagnant opponent, which has led to startling displays of US ambiguity and backpeddling.
Firstly, let us mention how quintessentially awkward and weak Trump looked in front of Xi:
This is because, as I had mentioned on X, Trump is so used to upstaging his servile and fawning ‘Western’ counterparts with a grab bag of showman’s gags and gimmicks that he looks positively out of his depth before a true statesman of Xi’s caliber. The overly glib demeanor and nervous antics fell completely flat before a stone-faced Xi, who did not seem even remotely impressed by Trump’s boisterous ‘Western charm’. Despite the fact that Trump is actually Xi’s elder by seven years, the optics gave more the impression of a man suffering a manchild, to the Chinese leader’s favor.
The meeting was said to have lasted under two hours, with rumors that joint press conferences and other ‘official’ pageantry were cancelled just as had been done in the Alaska meeting with Putin. In fact, an affectedly buoyant Trump called the meeting a “12 out of 10”, echoing his “10/10” rating for the humbug Putin-Alaska showdown months ago:
Trump immediately waddled off to Airforce one to fly back home as observers were left speculating if they’d just witnessed another PR flop.
Ask...why there were no joint statements, no press release, not even a press briefing, zero contract signed Trump would love to brag about good news to the world right away, not to the press corp inside AF1. Shortest 100mins meeting between the 2 parties, ever! Not curious?
China observer Arnaud Bertrand had an indepth analysis of what actually transpired, and who benefited from the agreed-upon de-escalations between Trump and Xi. Kathleen Tyson had another, even more detailed one.
Nothing seems absolutely certain as of yet, given the lack of official clarity but the concensus seems to be that Xi walked Trump down off the ledge and managed to get overall tariffs reduced from 57% to 47%. However, this appears to actually only be 16% in new tariffs, which is in line with what Trump levied on European goods, given that the remainder are carryover tariffs which had been in place since the Biden administration, and Trump’s first term before that. In turn, China will suspend its rare earths export controls for one year.
The problem is, some observers have noted that the official Chinese readout did not even mention rare earth export controls, and many are left questioning what exactly was even decided.
Trump says China agreed to delay rare earth restrictions. China’s official statement says nothing of the sort. Three points were confirmed:
– U.S. suspends tariffs for one year.
– U.S. suspends export bans for one year.
– U.S. suspends 301 investigations for one year.No mention of rare earths. No mention of TikTok. No Nvidia chips.
Once again, Trump negotiated with his own imagination, and declared victory over reality.
Just as the Russian side’s readout of the Alaska meeting appeared to greatly differ from the US side, it seems again we have the hallmarks of possible manipulation of results by the Americans to skew optics in Trump’s favor.
Many Western publications, however, had already levied their verdict, that this trade war was over before it had even begun:
When Trump rashly announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, he badly miscalculated. He seemed to think that China was vulnerable because it exported far more to the United States than it purchased. He apparently didn’t appreciate that much of what China purchased, like soybeans, it could get elsewhere — while Beijing is now the OPEC of rare earth minerals, leaving us without alternative sources. China controls about 90 percent of rare earths and is the sole supplier of six heavy rare earth minerals; it also dominates rare earth magnets.
BBC likewise wrote the following opinion:
Trump began the trade war with China in April from a position of strength and demanded capitulation. Nine months later, he is already making concessions for the sake of a fragile truce. Trump agreed to lift the punitive measures with which he had intended to force concessions from China, while Xi will lift only retaliatory threats — and even then, only temporarily, for a year. Just six months ago, Trump expected that tariffs would balance the trade deficit with China, and restrictions on the supply of advanced chips would curb the technological development of the U.S.’s main economic and military rival. None of the fundamental issues for which Trump started the trade war were resolved at today’s meeting. China simply raised the stakes before it — limiting the export of rare earth metals and magnets, without which Western car plants and the defense industry would grind to a halt. At the same time, China stopped buying soybeans from the U.S., driving American farmers to the brink of bankruptcy.
The BBC writes, adding that the outcome of the meeting is “good news for Russia and bad news for Ukraine.”
Though it’s difficult to know for certain, we can at least surmise that Trump’s showdown with China did not result in the type of rapturous success that would have adorned Trump’s pate with a new set of golden laurels. The mere fact that China stood its ground and scored even at minimum a draw is already a Chinese moral victory and signifies the symbolic arrival of China on the world stage as coequal which the US can no longer push around at whim.
Once again we’re reminded that most of these overtures are just geopolitical posture sessions on a grand scale: virtually none of it has any real consequence on the disaster brewing for the US economy.
The United States is facing a consumption crisis. One of the world’s largest food producers, Kraft Heinz, states that the US is approaching the worst downturn in history, as consumers are not even buying basic food products.
“We currently have one of the worst consumer sentiments in decades,” said CEO Carlos Abrams-Rivera on Wednesday during a conference call with analysts. Kraft Heinz shares fell 4.3% on Wednesday — down 17% since the start of the year, while the S&P 500 index rose 17%. Other major food companies have also pointed to pressure on American buyers, especially low-income families. Mondelez International said on Tuesday that consumers in distress are focusing on essential goods.
American restaurants are also facing problems with customer turnout. Chipotle on US consumers: “Earlier this year, amid a sharp decline in consumer sentiment, we saw a significant drop in restaurant visit frequency across all population categories. Since then, the gap has widened, and guests with low and middle incomes have been dining out even less.
We believe that guests with a household income of less than $100,000 account for about 40% of total sales, and they dine out less due to concerns about the future of the economy and inflation. The most problematic age group is 25 to 35 years old. We believe this trend is not unique to Chipotle and is observed in all restaurants as well as many product categories.”
Almost 60% of restaurant companies reported negative sales dynamics this year, and 51% reported negative dynamics over two years.
Operators have launched more than 40,000 discount offers, a record number, in an attempt to attract customers who are not returning. But increasing check amounts cannot solve the traffic problem. Nearly 40% of Americans are eating out less, and half of low-income people are cutting expenses. 82% say restaurant prices are rising sharply, and a quarter call the increase unjustified.
The fact of the matter is that the posturing with China is really all about obscuring the US’s economic demise, while also gaining leverage, sabotaging, and undercutting China as much as possible. This is because the US political class has no answers at all for its own failing economy, and thus must rely exclusively on the strategy of hamstringing its competitors. It’s all an act meant to forestall China’s takeover to buy time for the US corporo-political class to figure out a way to reset US’s runaway debt spiral and hyper-financialized Babylonian tower—which many now believe will happen by crypto-izing US debt:
AMERICA WANTS TO HAVE ALL THEIR 37 TRILLION DEBT IN CRYPTO then crash the market, eliminating the debt.
Translation: EXPORT THE DEBT TO OTHER NATIONS
This plan was enumerated in particular at the Eastern Economic Forum recently by Putin’s special advisor Anton Kobyakov:
U.S. CRYPTO PLOT EXPOSED: Wiping $35 trillion debt on world’s dime
“The US will solve their financial problems at the expense of the whole world, driving everyone into the crypto-currency cloud. Over time, when part of the US state debt will be placed in stablecoins, the US will devalue this debt,” Putin’s advisor Kobyakov revealed.
Everyone is talking about it now, from major MSM publications like, in this case, Reuters:
To even Larry Fink himself, who made some coincidentally ‘interesting’ statements on crypto recently, just as Peter Thiel hinted that BlackRock might have coopted all Bitcoin:
When a guy managing $13T says owning crypto makes sense because governments will keep killing their currencies... that’s your clue. The system’s insiders are quietly admitting what Bitcoiners knew all along. Watch what they do, not what they preach.
As stated earlier, at this point the theatrics with China and various tariff seesaws appear more a distraction and desperate time-buying theater. The US is insolvent and its entire economy is increasingly hinged on nothing more than an empty AI capital washing machine spinning the same inflating ball of lint in circles as the plebs are immiserated beyond the breaking point.
A new caste of crypto and finance speculators ride the wave of vapor-tech euphoria, enriching themselves to unseen heights while lending the false sense of an economic ‘boom’. In reality, they are merely bone oracles of a modern technomantic gematria—the black magic of finance, which has garrotted the world with its all-consuming art. Under such a shadow, what possible significance could Trump’s petty pilpul sessions on tariffs really have in the long run?
The rest of the world only follows suit into the abyss, while useless leaders with 11% approvals play dress up in vain attempts to stem the coming storm.
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The US hardly needs crypto to foist its debt onto the rest of the world. That has been the dollar's function since 1972. I was disappointed by reports that China will be relaxing its rare earth licensing restrictions, and I hope that's false. It would be a mighty blow to US imperialism for those restrictions to be enforced, and there's never going to be a better time to do it.
There seems to be a tremendous confabulation of the different assets lumped into the word 'crypto'. One is bitcoin, a deflationary currency and store of wealth that has diminishing new supply backed by energy; two is stablecoins, digital currencies pegged to the dollar and backed by a basket of assets including US Treasuries; and three crypto currencies, a variety of projects ranging from ponzi schemes and rug pulls, to blockchains for tokenization of assets.
The scheme the Russian minister was referring to involved stablecoins. The scheme would be to promote these stablecoins as digital dollars, have them purchased all over the world, and the holders would therefore be propping up the US bond market unknowingly, and then when these stablecoins inevitably de-peg from the dollar, the whole world will share in having their wealth devalued overnight.