When I wrote “Trump Is Already Losing The Trade War,” last March, I did not envision things going quite this badly for him quite this fast. Here it is just six months later, and I think it is possible to predict that Trump’s America can only suffer increasing losses as the catastrophe goes on.
Donald Trump, and those who support him, have good reason to be afraid of China in this tough game of hardball. China is in the ball park, ready to play. But the President of the United States, who issued the challenge, is in a sandbox holding a small bag of marbles.
Donald Trump has failed to understand one essential point about a trade war. To win it, you need friends. In that ignorance, he is antagonizing customers at the very time his competition is courting them.
The International Trade Commission has handed Trump just the tool he needs to crush the US solar power industry. Will he use it?
Are solar cells too cheap? That’s what the US International Trade Commission effectively ruled Friday, granting bankrupt US manufacturers SolarWorld and Suniva’s petition for relief from cheaper imported solar panels. Next, they’ll deliberate a remedy, which would likely mean job-crushing tariffs. The solar industry says that with the price of panels jacked up, hundreds of projects would be canceled and tens of thousands of jobs would be lost.
The US Department of Commerce has been deliberating over imposing duties on Chinese and Taiwanese solar PV imports for over half the year, but on Tuesday the Department finally announced its decision to penalize all Chinese shipments at a base rate of 165%, which could see duties jump past 200% in some … [continued]
China has announced it will reintroduce import tariffs of 6% a tonne on thermal coal used to generate electricity and a 3% a tonne on metallurgical coal used to smelt iron. The tariffs are not new but a return to those that were in place when China first began to … [continued]
Almost everyone in the media has taken a stab at summarizing, if not snap-judging, the results of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s one-day UN climate summit last week. The meeting had a real name, but Robert N. Stavins in his New York Times runup to the conference was the only writer I … [continued]
Maine has just pioneered a world first towards being able to trade weatherization on the cap and trade market. MaineHousing had a goal to get every home and half the businesses in Maine weatherized within the next twenty years, but like most states, is starved for funds to help homeowners … [continued]
We know that dozens of billions of US dollars go to imported oil every month (nearly $1 billion a day). We know that some of that must go to unstable, unsafe countries.
