Not so for Trump, who employed his characteristic bluster to promise dramatic change immediately upon assuming office.
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“Yes, it was negative what (Trump) said … but it’s not a big surprise – it wasn’t a U-turn in his rhetoric on the exchange rate so far”, said Commerzbank currency strategist Thu Lan Nguyen in Frankfurt.
Previous administrations have used three factors to determine if a country is a currency manipulator – a trade surplus with the USA of more than $20 billion; a current-account surplus totaling more than 3% of its gross domestic product; and repeatedly devaluing its currency by buying foreign assets that equals to 2% of output a year.
It turns out that wielding power – as opposed to criticizing it – can change your outlook. “We can’t get back to where we were 20 years ago and bring back all the jobs that were lost in Michigan, Ohio and these other states”, he says.
MARTIN: That chemistry was forged during a high-profile meeting between President Trump and President Xi last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
This hardly resembles the candidate Trump who sold himself as a pugnacious outsider, hell-bent on upending decades of US support for ever-freer trade to safeguard American jobs from nations that play unfairly.
Officials within Trump’s administration acknowledge a disconnect between the campaign-trail promises and White House actions. At one time, the Americans might have tempted China with the offer of membership in a regional trade deal, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which intentionally excluded the Chinese. “But that’s hurting – that will hurt ultimately”, Trump said on Wednesday.
And so it is – these days – with Russian Federation and China. US farmers, for example, have mostly benefited from NAFTA: Their exports to Mexico, for instance, have risen almost five-fold since the deal took effect in 1994.
Bannon, who used to run Breitbart News, would be the scariest character in the administration if he were better at bureaucratic infighting. The answer is simple: the United States is spending more than it’s producing or, in other terms, is borrowing more than it’s saving.
Reaching clear conclusions about all this flip-floppery is hard, given that it is impossible to know if Trump really means what he says on any subject.
The opposition Democratic Party leaders slammed Trump administration for going back on its poll promise.
Now, let’s look at the US side.
“That’s a butcher. That’s a butcher”, he said, “so I felt we had to do something about it”. Previously, after the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare failed, Trump said, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”. It was clear, under the department’s standards, that China was not guilty. But in the face of realities, there’s been a switch.
Not everyone was so taken with what one China expert dubbed the “insta-bromance” between Trump and Xi.
But on Wednesday, he explained why he launched missile strikes against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Trump sent tweets this week praising Xi for committing to help restrain North Korea, which may be on the verge of a sixth nuclear test. Beijing is Pyongyang’s closest ally. Trump’s accusations that foreign countries with large exports to the USA are “trade cheats” are puzzling in this perspective.
“We had a very good bonding”, he said. The U.S. president surely understood that the deployment of chemical weapons had something to do with his administration’s message that the U.S.no longer sought Assad’s ouster.
Trump’s about-face was notable because of how forceful he was in his insistence as recently as this month that China was a currency manipulator.
“You can not not talk to China”. I have no idea, and I doubt Trump knows, either. And as for the North Korea threat, which Trump once said China could easily resolve, the president now realizes it’s complicated.
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And then there is China, which is now being presented with awkward demands for a trade-off between economic concessions and security concessions over North Korea – not the sort of deal that Beijing cherishes or wishes to conclude. “The last thing they want is a flood of North Korean refugees coming over their border”, Pho said. We spent a lot of time together in Florida. “Failing to name China is a missed opportunity”. So we’ll see how it goes. On Wednesday he proclaimed “it’s no longer obsolete”, a seemingly miraculous rediscovery of goal for the usually slow-moving alliance.
