If there was sudden switch, and all trading flows ceased between the US and China, both countries would be harmed, but ours more severely. China doesn’t really depend on us for much. Soybeans? $0 in 2025 apparently. Oil? How about Canadian oil, eh?
They are heavily electrifying their economy, and solarizing, and nuclearizing their grid. They now have fast electric trains going everywhere… I’ve been on the Beijing to Shanghai high speed rail, it was awesome. We seem to fight and fight and overpay to build so much as a treehouse.
Chinese, Singaporean, Malaysian airports are beautiful, I come home to Houston, and ours are dingy and depressing. Houston Hobby listed as one of America’s worst recently. When you sit in the Cell Phone lots in the Houston airport, you feel like the resident of a homeless encampment.
We can’t fight a war without Chinese controlled rare earths.
Repeat - we can’t fight a war without rare earths.
“Cut off nose to spite face” comes to mind.
I can hear the shouts and grunts “we should just effing TAKE the rare earths!”. Land war in Asia, hundreds of times worse than Afghanistan… that would turn out poorly.
China is trying to be the adult on the world stage, and is backfilling the trade spaces that we leave, if they offer products to fill, not to mentioned foreign aid that ultimately benefits them, of course.
What we USED to do. The free food we sent abroad, was bought from US farmers.
I think it’s all just sad. I’m a bit insulated with my gold (US currency diversifier) and my heavy non-US stock allocation (and as a trader I date my stocks, I don’t marry them) and I look around at people and think to myself… “you have no earthly idea what could be coming in 2026 when sentiment turns into hard data”, especially considering that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are loaded with debt.
I look at the homeless and Houston and think… it’s not really hard times overall in America. What if we have a really bad recession or stagflation? What will society look like then? And who will be scapegoated for it?