Dear Commons Community,

Charles Gasparino, a veteran Fox Business Network correspondent declared that both President Donald Trump’s administration and China “blinked” when it came to negotiations between the countries on significantly easing tariffs.

Gasparino — in one of several posts on X, formerly Twitter — stressed that he “didn’t say we won” in response to a social media user who suggested Gasparino saw the deal as a U.S. victory.

“Trump raised tariffs on the world, the markets, particularly the bond market — which we need to finance our debt — rebelled,” Gasparino wrote in a separate post.

“Trump then was forced to back off.  End of story.   

Gasparino argued last month that the Trump administration had a “weak negotiating hand” at the time with the U.S. nearing a recession and markets being “on edge.”

“We need people to buy our debt, and China supplies us with a lot of cheap goods,” Gasparino said in an appearance on Fox News’ “The Story.”

“We could see inflation ratchet up dramatically if we don’t get a deal with them. And [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] knows this.”

The deal announced Monday sees the countries agreeing to a 90-day pause on tariffs, with the U.S. bringing its 145% tariffs down to 30% on Chinese imports and China dropping its 125% tariffs down to 10% on U.S. imports.

Gasparino on Monday also wrote that the tariffs have taught a “little lesson on how markets exert their power,” adding, “how when you have to depend on them as we still do (and remember its really the budget deficit thats causing the trade deficit and we need the budget deficit to maintain our standard of living) you can’t go to trade war with the world without bad stuff happening.”

Good to see this analysis from a Trump-friendly media outlet.

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.