On speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. Paul Krugman
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Dec. 16, 2019
President Trump walked away from his stated goals to make his China trade deal.
Trade wars rarely have victors. They do, however, sometimes have losers. And Donald Trump has definitely turned out to be a loser.
Of course, that’s not the way he and his team are portraying the tentative deal they’ve struck with China, which they’re claiming as a triumph. The reality is that the Trump administration achieved almost none of its goals; it has basically declared victory while going into headlong retreat.
And the Chinese know it. As The Times reports, Chinese officials are “jubilant and even incredulous” at the success of their hard-line negotiating strategy.
To understand what just went down, you need to ask what Trump and company were trying to accomplish with their tariffs, and how that compares with what really happened. Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
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First and foremost, Trump wanted to slash the U.S. trade deficit. Economists more or less unanimously consider this the wrong objective, but in Trump’s mind countries win when they sell more than they buy, and nobody is going to convince him otherwise.
So it’s remarkable to note that the trade deficit has risen, not fallen, on Trump’s watch, from $544 billion in 2016 to $691 billion in the 12 months ending in October. Paul Krugman’s Newsletter Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind. Sign up here.
And what Trump wanted in particular was to close the trade deficit in manufactured goods; despite giving lip service to “great Patriot Farmers,” it’s clear that he actually has contempt for agricultural exports. Last summer, complaining about the U.S. trade relationship with Japan, he sneered: “We send them wheat. Wheat. That’s not a good deal.”
So now we appear to have a trade deal with China whose main substantive element is … a promise to buy more U.S. farm goods.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Trump’s team also wanted to put the brakes on China’s drive to establish itself as the world’s economic superpower. “China is basically trying to steal the future,” declared Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, a year ago. But the new deal, while it includes some promises to protect intellectual property, leaves the core of China’s industrial strategy — what’s been called the “vast web of subsidies that has fueled the global rise of many Chinese companies” — untouched.
So why did Trump wimp out on trade?
At a broad level, the answer is that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. America was never going to succeed in bullying a huge, proud nation whose economy is already, by some measures, larger than ours — especially while simultaneously alienating other advanced economies that might have joined us in pressuring China to change some of its economic policies.
At a more granular level, none of the pieces of Trump trade strategy have worked as promised.
Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that China is paying his tariffs, the facts say otherwise: Chinese export prices haven’t gone down, which means that the tariffs are falling on U.S. consumers and companies. And the bite on consumers would have gone up substantially if Trump hadn’t called off the round of further tariff increases that had been scheduled for this past Sunday.
At the same time, Chinese retaliation has hit some U.S. exporters, farmers in particular, hard. And while Trump may quietly hold farm exports in contempt, he needs those rural votes — votes that were being put at risk despite a farm bailout that has already cost more than twice as much as Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto industry.
Finally, uncertainty over tariff policy was clearly hurting manufacturing and business investment, even as overall economic growth remained solid.
So Trump, as I said, basically declared victory and retreated.
Will Trump’s trade defeat hurt him politically? Probably not. Many Americans will surely buy the spin, and the trade war was never popular anyway.
Furthermore, voting mostly reflects the economy’s direction, not its level — not whether things are good, but whether they’ve been getting better recently. It may actually be good political strategy to do stupid things for a while, then stop doing them around a year before the election, which is a fair summary of Trump’s trade actions. Editors’ Picks This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry She Accused a Tech Billionaire of Rape. The Chinese Internet Turned Against Her. Nike’s Fastest Shoes May Give Runners an Even Bigger Advantage Than We Thought Continue reading the main story
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
There will, however, be longer-term costs to the trade war. For one thing, the business uncertainty created by Trump’s capriciousness won’t go away; he is, after all, a master of the art of the broken deal.
Beyond that, Trump’s trade antics have damaged America’s reputation.
On one side, our allies have learned not to trust us. We have, after all, become the kind of country that suddenly slaps tariffs on Canada — Canada! — on obviously spurious claims that we’re protecting national security.
On the other side, our rivals have learned not to fear us. Like the North Koreans, who flattered Trump but kept on building nukes, the Chinese have taken Trump’s measure. They now know that he talks loudly but carries a small stick, and backs down when confronted in ways that might hurt him politically.
These things matter. Having a leader who is neither trusted by our erstwhile friends nor feared by our foreign rivals reduces our global influence in ways we’re just starting to see. Trump’s trade war didn’t achieve any of its goals, but it did succeed in making America weak again.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
贸易战鲜有胜利者。但有时会有失败者。而且唐纳德·特朗普绝对是个失败者。
当然，他和他的团队是不会这样形容与中国达成的临时协议的，他们声称这是胜利。现实情况是，特朗普政府几乎没有实现任何目标；基本上可以说是在宣告胜利后仓皇撤退。
而且中国也知道。正如《纽约时报》报道的那样，中国官员对于强硬的谈判策略的成功感到“欣喜甚至难以置信”
川普被刷了
中共这次损失惨重，正在低调处理，慢慢地做国内的思想工作，扭扭捏捏不想马上签。
版上几个老字号的粉毛，也不约而同地进入了潜水模式。
结果NYT急不可耐地跳出来，说中国大胜。大胜还不赶紧抢着签？这就尴尬了。
ps 祝贺主流媒体（反川fake news左煤+tg大外宣-）wsj，cnn，nytimes，时代，彭博社，榜单必选，耳熟能详，明年忽悠更多人，加速加速
没有，你理解错了。
是中国政府输了，中国公司赢了。
如果光就，政府间的讨价还价，是中国政府输了更多的钱。
但是，反而给中国的公司松绑，减税，还有更多的盈利和创新空间。
这话还是有几分道理的，签了起码老百姓不用吃猪瘟肉
香港媒体就翻译得好些。
香港许多媒体分析得就是，中国输了，中国人赢了。
这就跟五毛不管中美谈得怎么样，都是厉害国赢有异曲同工之妙
Ssss
On speaking loudly and carrying a small stick.
Paul Krugman
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Dec. 16, 2019
President Trump walked away from his stated goals to make his China trade deal.
Trade wars rarely have victors. They do, however, sometimes have losers. And Donald Trump has definitely turned out to be a loser.
Of course, that’s not the way he and his team are portraying the tentative deal they’ve struck with China, which they’re claiming as a triumph. The reality is that the Trump administration achieved almost none of its goals; it has basically declared victory while going into headlong retreat.
And the Chinese know it. As The Times reports, Chinese officials are “jubilant and even incredulous” at the success of their hard-line negotiating strategy.
To understand what just went down, you need to ask what Trump and company were trying to accomplish with their tariffs, and how that compares with what really happened.
Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
First and foremost, Trump wanted to slash the U.S. trade deficit. Economists more or less unanimously consider this the wrong objective, but in Trump’s mind countries win when they sell more than they buy, and nobody is going to convince him otherwise.
So it’s remarkable to note that the trade deficit has risen, not fallen, on Trump’s watch, from $544 billion in 2016 to $691 billion in the 12 months ending in October.
Paul Krugman’s Newsletter
Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind. Sign up here.
And what Trump wanted in particular was to close the trade deficit in manufactured goods; despite giving lip service to “great Patriot Farmers,” it’s clear that he actually has contempt for agricultural exports. Last summer, complaining about the U.S. trade relationship with Japan, he sneered: “We send them wheat. Wheat. That’s not a good deal.”
So now we appear to have a trade deal with China whose main substantive element is … a promise to buy more U.S. farm goods.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Trump’s team also wanted to put the brakes on China’s drive to establish itself as the world’s economic superpower. “China is basically trying to steal the future,” declared Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, a year ago. But the new deal, while it includes some promises to protect intellectual property, leaves the core of China’s industrial strategy — what’s been called the “vast web of subsidies that has fueled the global rise of many Chinese companies” — untouched.
So why did Trump wimp out on trade?
At a broad level, the answer is that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. America was never going to succeed in bullying a huge, proud nation whose economy is already, by some measures, larger than ours — especially while simultaneously alienating other advanced economies that might have joined us in pressuring China to change some of its economic policies.
At a more granular level, none of the pieces of Trump trade strategy have worked as promised.
Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that China is paying his tariffs, the facts say otherwise: Chinese export prices haven’t gone down, which means that the tariffs are falling on U.S. consumers and companies. And the bite on consumers would have gone up substantially if Trump hadn’t called off the round of further tariff increases that had been scheduled for this past Sunday.
At the same time, Chinese retaliation has hit some U.S. exporters, farmers in particular, hard. And while Trump may quietly hold farm exports in contempt, he needs those rural votes — votes that were being put at risk despite a farm bailout that has already cost more than twice as much as Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto industry.
Finally, uncertainty over tariff policy was clearly hurting manufacturing and business investment, even as overall economic growth remained solid.
So Trump, as I said, basically declared victory and retreated.
Will Trump’s trade defeat hurt him politically? Probably not. Many Americans will surely buy the spin, and the trade war was never popular anyway.
Furthermore, voting mostly reflects the economy’s direction, not its level — not whether things are good, but whether they’ve been getting better recently. It may actually be good political strategy to do stupid things for a while, then stop doing them around a year before the election, which is a fair summary of Trump’s trade actions.
Editors’ Picks
This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry
She Accused a Tech Billionaire of Rape. The Chinese Internet Turned Against Her.
Nike’s Fastest Shoes May Give Runners an Even Bigger Advantage Than We Thought
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
There will, however, be longer-term costs to the trade war. For one thing, the business uncertainty created by Trump’s capriciousness won’t go away; he is, after all, a master of the art of the broken deal.
Beyond that, Trump’s trade antics have damaged America’s reputation.
On one side, our allies have learned not to trust us. We have, after all, become the kind of country that suddenly slaps tariffs on Canada — Canada! — on obviously spurious claims that we’re protecting national security.
On the other side, our rivals have learned not to fear us. Like the North Koreans, who flattered Trump but kept on building nukes, the Chinese have taken Trump’s measure. They now know that he talks loudly but carries a small stick, and backs down when confronted in ways that might hurt him politically.
These things matter. Having a leader who is neither trusted by our erstwhile friends nor feared by our foreign rivals reduces our global influence in ways we’re just starting to see. Trump’s trade war didn’t achieve any of its goals, but it did succeed in making America weak again.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
特朗普是如何输掉这场贸易战的
保罗·克鲁格曼
2019年12月17日
特朗普背弃了他宣称的目标以达成和中国的贸易协定。
贸易战鲜有胜利者。但有时会有失败者。而且唐纳德·特朗普绝对是个失败者。
当然，他和他的团队是不会这样形容与中国达成的临时协议的，他们声称这是胜利。现实情况是，特朗普政府几乎没有实现任何目标；基本上可以说是在宣告胜利后仓皇撤退。
而且中国也知道。正如《纽约时报》报道的那样，中国官员对于强硬的谈判策略的成功感到“欣喜甚至难以置信”。
要了解真正发生了什么，你要去问特朗普和他的团队，他们究竟想通过加征关税实现什么，以及现实是否如此。
首先，特朗普想大幅度削减美国的贸易逆差。经济学家或多或少都一致认为这是一个错误的目标，但在特朗普的想法中，当一个国家卖的多、买的少就赢了，没人能说服他。
然而值得注意的是，在特朗普任职期间，贸易逆差不减反增，从2016年10月的5440亿美元增加到次年10月的6910亿美元。
特朗普尤其想要消除制造业产品的贸易逆差，尽管他对“伟大的爱国农民”信誓旦旦，但显然他看不起农产品出口。去年夏天，在抱怨与日本的贸易关系时，他冷笑道：“我们给他们送去了小麦。小麦。这不是个好交易。”
那么现在我们似乎和中国达成了一项贸易协议，其主要实质内容是……购买更多美国农产品的承诺。
特朗普的团队还希望制止中国成为世界经济超级大国所做的努力。“中国基本上是企图窃取未来，”一年前，高层贸易顾问彼得·纳瓦罗(Peter Navarro)宣称。然而新协议虽然包括了一些保护知识产权的承诺，但未触及中国产业战略的核心，即“推动许多中国公司在全球崛起的庞大补贴网络”。
那么为什么特朗普在贸易上这么畏手畏脚呢？
从广义上讲，他被宏伟的妄想所蒙蔽。压制一个辽阔且自豪、经济完备并在某些方面比美国还大的国家，美国永远不可能成功——更何况同时还在疏远其他的发达国家，这些国家本可以和我们联手向中国施压，促其改变经济政策。
从比较细节的层面看，特朗普的贸易战略里没有一样像承诺的那样起效。
特朗普一再坚称是中国在支付他的关税，但事实却并非如此：中国出口价格并未下降，这意味着关税落在了美国消费者和公司的头上。如果特朗普没有取消原定于上周日加征的那轮关税，消费者的负担将会大幅增加。
同时，中国的报复严重打击了美国的出口商，尤其是农民。特朗普也许可以悄悄地蔑视农产品出口商，但他需要那些来自农村的选票——尽管对农业的援助已经是贝拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)对汽车业援助的两倍之多，他仍面临失去这些票的危险。
最终，尽管总体经济增长保持稳定，但关税政策的不确定性显然正在损害制造业和商业投资。
因此，正如我所说，特朗普基本上是宣布获胜然后撤退。
特朗普的贸易失利会在政治上伤害他吗？可能不会。许多美国人无疑会听信这一套把戏，而且反正贸易战从来都不受欢迎。
此外，投票主要反映的是经济走向，而不是经济水平——不是事情是否是好的，而是它们近期是否正在有所好转。实际上，做一番愚蠢的事，然后在大选前一年停止，可能是个好的政治策略，其实就是特朗普贸易行动的一个合理总结。
但是，贸易战将带来长期的代价。一方面，特朗普反覆无常所造成的商业不确定性不会消失；他毕竟是做糟糕交易的大师。
除此以外，特朗普在贸易上的古怪举动还损害了美国的声誉。
一方面，我们的盟友懂得了不要信任我们。毕竟我们已经成为突然对加拿大征税的国家——加拿大！——还用保护国家安全这种明显站不住脚的理由。
另一方面，我们的竞争对手懂得了不用惧怕我们。就像朝鲜人一边奉承特朗普一边制造核武器一样，中国人也摸清了特朗普有几斤几两。他们现在知道了特朗普雷声大雨点小，而且在用政治上会给他带来伤害的方式对付他时，他会退缩。
这些东西很重要。有一个既不被我们以前的盟友所信任，又不被我们的外国对手所惧怕的领导者，将会降低我们的全球影响力，这一迹象才刚刚开始显现。特朗普的贸易战没有实现任何目标，但它成功地让美国再次筋疲力竭。
保罗·克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)自2000年以来一直是时报的专栏作家。他也是纽约市立大学研究生中心的杰出教授，因在国际贸易和经济地理方面的成就获得2008年诺贝尔经济学奖。欢迎在Twitter上关注他 @PaulKrugman。
翻译：邓妍
中国公司都公私合营了，和党国共存亡了
Just believe
不要乱硬来！
这就是传说中的的那些一个字的ID，大外宣海外组吧？
2000亿！还吃亏？川推空手套白狼，要我梦里都要笑醒了
2000亿！还吃亏？川推空手套白狼，要我梦里都要笑醒了
☆ 发自 iPhone 华人一网 1.14.05
☆ 发自 iPhone 华人一网 1.14.05
低级红还是高级黑？
Paul Krugman 是不是那个说Trump做总统股市就暴跌的那位？
很傻的中共国思维。
那是，tg怎么可能输呢? 从来都是从一个是胜利走向另一个胜利