While you weren't looking the trade war with China went completely off the rails

[mucifer]

To understand why you have to understand why the US started a trade war with China started in the first place. It started with a very specific investigation — an investigation into China's theft of US intellectual property (IP) using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

The investigation determined what many in the business community had been talking about for years, the fact that China abused its US partners, stole the IP of American companies, forced those companies to reveal their technology to Chinese counterparts and muscled US firms out of the Chinese economy in favor of state owned enterprises (SOEs).

This, the Trump administration said, was a problem beyond the capacity of the World Trade Organization. It was a problem worth going to economic war over. And so we did.

I

t's Trump's obsession with that deficit that drives him to negotiate so hard for China's purchase of US goods. And as I've written before, as long as he's tilting at this particular windmill with the force of a thousand Don Quixotes negotiations will vacillate between being serious and being ridiculous.Now it seems they may stay firmly in the ridiculous.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-trade-war-us-china-tariffs-lost-no-meaning-2019-11?utm_source=reddit.com