Trump has picked a trade fight with adversaries who just don’t care
The focus on metal manufacturing fundamentally misunderstands the nature of America’s trade with the world
Sydney — There’s a strange thing about the fire and fury that President Donald Trump is planning to wreak on the foreigners killing American manufacturing: the foreigners don’t seem to care. News of the planned 25% tariffs on steel and 10% levy on aluminium imports broke during the lunch break on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Thursday. Shares in Baoshan Iron & Steel, China’s biggest listed producer, promptly fell the most since, um, Wednesday. It was the same pattern when markets opened in Asia on Friday, with the drops from Japan’s biggest producer — Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal — and Korea’s paramount Posco pretty much in line with the declines they suffered two days earlier. That previous slump wasn’t prompted by anything going on in Washington, but by an index of Chinese manufacturing that unexpectedly came in about 0.8 points below forecast. That’s to be expected. For all the sturm und drang coming out of the White House, China’s trade in steel and aluminium with the US isn’t...
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