Japan decided Saturday to continue to press the United States to review its extra tariffs on Japanese automobiles during bilateral talks aimed at scrapping the Trump administration’s tariff measures.
Washington has excluded automobiles and other key items from the scope of the talks. In response, Tokyo has insisted that it will make no concessions as it presses for a complete overhaul of each of the duties imposed Saturday, including those on auto parts.
“There is still a wide gulf between [Japan’s and the United States’] positions, and no common ground has emerged,” Ishiba told reporters after the meeting.
This is Japan starting to play hardball, and I gotta say, it’s a fantastic play by them. They are currently holding a $1T fiscal knife to our throat (their US bond portfolio, and the threat to resume/continue a coordinated sell with other countries), and it’s absolutely a reasonable strategy under these (admittedly completely insane) circumstances.
Don’t some in the current admin want them to dump bonds though?
The world dumping US bonds en masse would herald the destruction of the USD global standard. It is difficult to overstate the economic chaos and destruction that would follow.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked if someone in the orangeboi admin had a brainwave and decided “let’s get rid of US Government Bonds”
I read a theory that they want to devalue the USD to bolster exports, while holding access to the US market hostage in order to negotiate a new deal that keeps the USD as a reserve currency. TBH, if the US market was as important for the world as it used to be post WWII, perhaps they could pull that off without uncontrollable hemorrhage. Today though… that’s not as strong of a hand as they might think.
I’m not convinced we have any hand whatsoever. The world economy might be thrown into a bit of chaos, but more and more countries are starting to tell the US to go fuck itself. It’s not inconceivable to think of the US being completely irrelevant and ignored economically within the next decade.
I’m waiting for them to start talking about a ‘controlled default’, aka ‘a default’.
And I’d bet a year’s (or a quarter’s? Or a month’s?) salary (that’s a joke about hyperinflation) that they’ll blame it on Biden, and their imbecilic cult followers will believe it.
Can I read more about this somewhere?
It was honestly a masterclass in geoeconomics. Canada coordinating this response, and Japan being one of the biggest components of the scheme, was absolutely the primary reason that the whole 90d delay thing happened. It was, in geopolitical terms, this meme:
