When Trump imposed tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods in the fall, the Trump regime said they may quickly impose tariffs on $260 billion of additional goods representing virtually everything we import from China.
According to Bloomberg, the Trump regime plans to formally announce those tariffs in December and officially impose them in February.
An early-December announcement of a new product list would mean the effective date -- after a 60-day public comment period -- may coincide with China’s Lunar New Year holiday in early February. The list would apply to the imports from the Asian nation that aren’t already covered by previous rounds of tariffs -- which may be $257 billion using last year’s import figures, according to two of the people.
U.S. officials are preparing for such a scenario in case a planned Trump-Xi meeting yields no progress on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires in November, according to two of the people, who declined to be identified to discuss internal deliberations. They cautioned that final decisions had not been made.
There's virtually no chance at all that a brief meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 will lead to a breakthrough. A brief meeting could even lead to something worse if Trump behaves the same way he did on the sidelines of the G7 in June when he smeared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
We've been over this what feels like a hundred times before, but even if Trump were not a blustering asshole who offends nearly everyone he comes into contact with, the incoherent demands he has made to Chinese officials are not something that's going to be resolved in a single meeting or any other meeting.
Trump has repeatedly demanded that China reduce our trade deficit, but they can't do that because the deficit is driven by American consumers, not the Chinese.
Likewise, a tariff on Chinese goods is not a tax on the Chinese, it's a tax on American consumers.
Trump's tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods (which are on the books right now) are suppose to automatically increase from 10 to 25 percent on January 1st. Between that and another round of tariffs in February, I don't think you have to be an economist to see rough times ahead for our consumer-driven economy. Analysts who spoke to Reuters just this week said they see consumer spending slowing down during the first half of the year (after a strong holiday shopping season) and that was before today's news that Trump will impose more tariffs.