“While Trump shows other countries nothing but his tariff stick, China has been offering carrots.  Beijing has repeatedly cut its duties on imports from America’s commercial rivals, including Canada, Japan, and Germany.”

In an amazingly researched piece, Chad Brown at the Peterson Institute of International Economics documents that while China is raising its tariffs in retaliation to the US, it is lowering its tariffs to the rest of the world. Probably to limit the negative impact from the Trump Tariff War. So the escalation in tariffs Trump is forcing is only half the bad news for US exporters, the other half is American companies and workers now are at a considerable cost disadvantage relative to both Chinese firms and firms in third countries. The result is one more eerie parallel to the conditions US exporters faced in the 1930s.