HONG KONG: Dashing hopes of a quick agreement on trade relations with China, US President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed punitive tariffs on another US$200 billion of Chinese goods.

Now that the Chinese government has responded with new tariffs on US$60 billion of US products, the United States is threatening tariffs targeting yet another US$300 billion of Chinese imports.

Both sides are now digging in for a long fight – largely because Americans have yet to feel the pain of Trump’s policies.

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THE AMERICA FIRST DOCTRINE

China has understood Trump’s transactional style for some time. But it only recently began to appreciate fully the significance of Trump’s “America First” doctrine, which according to US State Department Policy Director Kiron Skinner, rests on four pillars: National sovereignty, reciprocity, burden-sharing, and regional partnerships.

National sovereignty and reciprocity are standard features of any country’s foreign policy. They form the foundations of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which recognised after the Thirty Years War that sovereign states have their own interests to defend, and must engage with other states on a reciprocal basis.

But the Trump administration often takes reciprocity too far, weakening America’s capacity to build and maintain partnerships, regional or otherwise. 

Indeed, under Trump, the US has undercut the interests of its closest allies for its own narrow benefit, even threatening to impose broad tariffs on automobile and auto-part imports from the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, claiming that they pose a national security threat.

President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 25% punitive duties on autos but will hold off for up to six months while talks continue. (Photo: AFP/Justin SULLIVAN)

In any case, the active ingredient of the Trump doctrine is burden-sharing. Skinner interprets this narrowly, focusing on the need for America’s NATO allies to increase their defence spending. 

What she does not acknowledge is that the US is also forcing the rest of the world to share the burden of its unsustainable structural savings deficit.

SHARING THE BURDEN OF A SAVINGS DEFICIT

The US consistently runs both a fiscal deficit – with total expenditure (of which defence comprised 14.8 per cent in 2017) significantly exceeding its income – and a current-account deficit.

If those twin deficits run at a trend rate of over 3 per cent of GDP per annum, net US debt to the rest of the world – currently at 40 per cent of GDP – will double in less than 24 years.

The Trump administration insists that the only deficit to worry about is the bilateral trade deficit with China. 

But even if China bowed to US demands and eliminated the bilateral deficit, America’s imbalance of saving and investment would merely shift its external deficit – like water in a squeezed balloon – toward other surplus economies, like the EU, Japan, and South Korea (the targets of the threatened automotive tariffs).

US President Donald Trump (left) shakes hands with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe before a working lunch at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo on May 27, 2019. (Photo: AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
 


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A GRAND BARGAIN

For decades, the US saving shortfall seemed like a problem to be managed, not solved. Since the US started running structural deficits in the 1970s, there has been a kind of global “grand bargain” on the topic.

The world willingly finances America’s current-account deficit in US dollars; in exchange, the US acts as a guarantor of free trade and global security.

The Trump doctrine upends that bargain. By weaponising America’s economic leverage (including the US dollar), it aims to force the world to uphold its end, with no guarantee that the US will respond in kind.

This approach will end up costing virtually everyone – beginning with American consumers. With its trade war, the Trump administration is engaging in tax subterfuge.

Historically, governments have addressed their excessive debts with tax increases, spending cuts, higher inflation (with negative real interest rates), or, in the case of the Roman Empire, conquest of creditors.

It seems to be politically impossible for the US government to raise taxes domestically. So the Trump administration has found a workaround: Tariff increases end up serving effectively as consumption taxes, but because they can be blamed on foreigners, they are more palatable to the American public.

THREATENING TO BIG CORPORATES

From Trump’s perspective, the costs of this approach appear low. 

With the US economy still growing, stock markets at record highs, and unemployment at record lows, JPMorgan has estimated that the trade war’s direct costs will amount to just 0.2 per cent of GDP for the US, 0.4 per cent of GDP for China, and 0.22 per cent of GDP for the rest of the world through 2020.

The United States had another giant month of job creation in April. (Photo: AFP/Drew Angerer)

But today’s prosperity hinges mainly on the temporary effects of budget-busting tax cuts and quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve, which expanded its balance sheet by US$3.6 trillion from 2007 to 2017 (it has since reduced that total by US$391 billion).

Historically low interest rates and liquidity-inflated asset bubbles financed the fiscal deficit and enabled the household sector to deleverage.

That wealth was not, however, shared equally; This approach has deepened domestic inequality.

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For example, every time the S&P 500 has dipped over the last decade, corporate share buybacks (amounting to US$5 trillion from 2008 to 2018) provided a cushion. 

This was technically good for growth: the S&P 500 index rose by a total of 319 per cent from its 2009 trough to its March 2019 peak. But Trump’s trade war is threatening even those narrowly shared gains.

For the top 25 S&P companies – with a combined market capitalisation exceeding US$20 trillion – just under one-third of revenues come from China, meaning that tariffs on Chinese imports will hit profits.

Tech giants that depend on chips, components, and software sales to China – amounting to 20 to 65 per cent of total revenue – will face particularly high costs, as will US shoe importers.

China’s Vice Premier Liu He (right), Chinese vice ministers and senior officials pose for a photograph before the start of US-China Trade Talks at the White House, Feb 21, 2019. (File photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)

READY FOR A TRUCE?

The trade war seems not to have caused much pain yet, because financial markets assume (perhaps wrongly) that central banks will bail them out.

But after 117 consecutive months of economic expansion – compared to an historical average of 48 months – the US could soon find itself in a painful recession, owing to disruptions caused by Trump’s trade war. Perhaps then it will be ready for a truce.

Andrew Sheng is Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance. Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, is a professor and Director of the Research Institute of Maritime Silk-Road at Peking University HSBC Business School.

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