Ann: Dorado-3 Drilling Update, page-88

There are grievances on all sides - the EU, China, US and the rest of the world (including us).

Unfortunately, Mr Trump believes in his own hype: he believes he can bully them into accepting his demands (as he did to Mexico and Canada). But the EU and China are Not budging.

Trump erroneously believes the US can outlast China/EU in this trade war, but IMHO, he is wrong. The Chinese do not carry a lot of debts, their savings rate is around 30% and the vast majority of their borrowings are domestic. Whereas the US has over 100% debts to GDP, their savings rate is around 2% and around 30% of US debts are owed to foreigners.

There are No Clean Hands in this dispute: each side is just trying to outdo the other side.

The best thing for all of us (the world), is for all sides to take their disputes to the WTO and abide by its decisions.

From an Australian perspective, I certainly don't want us to lose our $50B in trade surplus with China, as that would mean a 5% contraction to our economy (a deep recession), with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.