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Trade

From Tariffs To Tribute: The $350B Price Of ‘Parity’

On October 29, 2025, the carefully scripted pageantry of the US-ROK alliance in Gyeongju and Seoul met an unwelcome counter-narrative from the streets. While US President Donald Trump was being feted with a Silla-era replica gold crown and Korea’s highest honor, thousands of workers, trade unionists, farmers, students, and women’s collectives converged near the APEC venues. They chanted a unified dissent: “No kings!” and “No to APEC for the 1%”. Organizers framed the protest as a demand for the restoration of national dignity against what they saw as an act of economic coercion.

United States Scrambles To Put Pressure On Nicaragua

“We were already struggling with 18% tariffs this year, I don't know how we could export our coffee under 100% tariffs,” René Gaitan tells me as we watch the clouds clear out over a breathtaking expanse of Nicaraguan landscape. The view from the El Porvenir worker-owned coffee cooperative stretches from Lake Managua up toward the Honduran border, dominated by the smoking crater of the Telica volcano. Gaitán is the vice president of the 51-family cooperative. The co-op is remote; its members hike eight kilometers to get the bus to the city of León, a three-hour ride away. But the news on 20 October that the U.S. may impose 100% tariffs on the Central American nation reached the co-op with the lightning speed of the internet on Gaitan's smart phone, charged by solar panels.

Germany Is Sabotaging Its Relations With China

The visit of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to Beijing 50 years ago was a visit that lifted German-Chinese relations to a completely new level. On 31 October 1975, Schmidt met the Chinese head of state Mao Zedong. In preparation he had read Mao’s poems. It was the first visit of a German chancellor to China. Schmidt remained someone who, throughout his life, wanted to break with the colonial past of the West in China, and advocated relations on equal footing and with mutual respect. For example, in his discussion of the book The Governance of China by Chinese President Xi Jinping, he called on the West to replace arrogance with fair competition in its relationship with China.

The WTO And The Future Of International Trade

The current upheaval in international trade governance, with Trump’s return to the presidency, does not represent the death of global trade itself. But it does represent the final unraveling of the liberal institutional framework that emerged triumphant in the 1990s. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), as the institutional embodiment of this liberal paradigm, finds itself in a systemic crisis. Although the WTO crisis started before Trump’s two terms of office, what we see now is a critical moment which requires a fundamental reconceptualisation of international economic governance. The 1990s marked the zenith of liberal multilateralism in trade governance. It was characterised by unprecedented coordination among major powers pursuing market liberalisation.

Trump Forces Europe, Korea, Japan To Subsidize And Move Industry To US

U.S. cold warriors have failed to prevent Russia, China, Iran, and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) from obtaining their economic independence. That means keeping the fruits of their economic growth for themselves, rather than letting it be drained off by U.S. banks, investors, consumers, and the U.S. Treasury through the monetary dollar standard. Washington’s cold warriors have been unable to stop SCO members from moving forward and becoming independent from U.S. influence. Recognizing that they are unable to prevent this, U.S. policy is focusing now on how to prevent Europe (especially Germany), Japan, and South Korea from becoming industrial rivals and hence threats — while also targeting China and BRICS.

Tariff Pressure Under Trump: A New Economic Colonialism

The current US administration is determined to abandon multilateral frameworks, favoring instead the resolution of trade disputes through bilateral negotiations, one by one, in pursuit of maximizing US interests. It has openly declared its intention to replace multilateral agreements with bilateral pressure, believing that the US holds stronger leverage in one-on-one negotiations. Under this approach, the US unilaterally launched a global tariff war on what it called “Liberation Day”, using threats of high tariffs as a bargaining chip to force its trade partners into submission. This strategy led to a series of bilateral trade agreements, in which individual economies – including the United Kingdom, Japan, and the European Union – were pressured into making compromises and concessions to the US.

Big Corporations Are Using Trump Trade Chaos To Jack Up Prices

The effects of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs are winding their way through the American economy, and a new piece of analysis claims that corporate America is using them as “cover” to further jack up prices. Progressive advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative issued a new report on Tuesday that uses corporate executives’ own words to show how many firms are taking advantage of the tariff situation by using it as an all-purpose justification for price increases. The report found many of these executives’ admissions through quarterly earnings calls in which they discussed plans to increase costs even if their inputs were not being significantly affected by the tariffs.

US Gas Exporters Are Sweating Over Meeting Europe’s Pollution Standards

As Europe races toward a U.S. trade deal, lobbyists for America’s biggest natural gas exporters are pushing to carve a major loophole in the EU’s methane rules, using ongoing trade and tariff disputes in a campaign to weaken Europe’s climate standards. “It’s very clear that the industry and the State Department are putting a lot of pressure on the EU to just give us a pass on this methane rule and commit to our dirty LNG,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director for Oil Change International and co-author of a new report detailing climate impacts from five U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects. “And we certainly hope the EU does not buckle to that pressure. But it’s extremely concerning because there’s a lot at stake.”

Europe Is Finally Taking Action For Palestine, But It’s Too Little, Too Late

On Wednesday, Israeli forces in the West Bank opened fire in the direction of a delegation of European, Arab, and Asian diplomats. In yet another mark of Israeli hubris, the Israeli military said it “regrets the inconvenience.” The timing of this incident is not coincidental. Earlier this week, the European Union, many of its member states, and other Western countries issued statements and took steps that appeared to finally represent concrete actions to pressure Israel to change its behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. The question is whether that is really what happened. It started with a letter from a coalition of states that fund international humanitarian efforts.

Trump’s Far-Fetched Attempt To Divide Russia And China Is Clearly Failing

US President Donald Trump claimed he would “un-unite” Russia and China. However, this divide-and-conquer strategy — which prominent US officials like Henry Kissinger have advocated since the 1970s — is clearly failing. In a meeting in Moscow celebrating the 80th anniversary of their nations’ shared victory in World War Two, Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin reaffirmed that “China-Russia relations have reached the highest level in history”. In a lengthy statement, Beijing and Moscow vowed to “jointly resist any attempts to interfere with and disrupt the traditional friendship and deep mutual trust between China and Russia”.

China-Celac Forum Brings Latin America And China Together

Ten years after its creation, the China-CELAC Forum has consolidated its position as one of the most relevant platforms for dialogue between Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. “The platform has strengthened cooperation between CELAC members and China, based on sovereign equality, mutual respect, plurality, and shared benefits,” states the meeting’s final joint declaration. Under the theme “Planning development and revitalization together, jointly building a China-LAC community with a shared future,” the meeting brought together representatives from more than 30 countries and leaders such as Xi Jinping (China), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Gustavo Petro (Colombia), and Gabriel Boric (Chile).

War By Other Means: Trump’s Tariffs And The Empire’s Final Gamble

Over the past two weeks, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the global economy by announcing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries. This abrupt move sent stock markets in the US and abroad into a tailspin, forcing the administration to quickly backpedal. In a hasty retreat, Trump revised the policy to impose a lower, across-the-board 10% tariff (25% for aluminium and steel), while simultaneously singling out China with a staggering 145% tariff on all imports from the country, one of the most extreme trade measures in modern history—though some categories were subsequently exempted.

Trump’s Tariffs Hurt The United States Much More Than China

Why has US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on countries all around the world? And in particular, why is Trump waging a trade war on China? What are his real goals? Well, to try to answer these questions, I spoke with the economist Michael Hudson, who is the author of many books, and who just published the new report “Return of the robber barons: Trump’s distorted view of US tariff history“. Michael Hudson outlined the history of the use of tariffs in the United States and in other countries, and he explained how Trump is using tariffs as a weapon of class war, to benefit the rich at the expense of the vast majority of the population, and also how Trump is trying to reshape the global financial system, in order to benefit the United States at the expense of everyone else.

How Eco-Localism Differs From Tariff Terrorism

Trade makes many folks materially better off by enabling a local abundance of resources or skills to be shared across a wider area. However, increased trade often worsens economic inequality and depletes and pollutes the environment faster than would otherwise happen. Therefore, eco-localists see trade as a mixed benefit whose unintended negative impacts must be carefully managed. Globalization of trade raises the stakes of both benefits and risks. On the risk side of the ledger, taken to the extreme, it leads to a world in which everything is for sale, all resources are depleted, pollution is everywhere, labor is exploited to the maximum degree, and everything is owned by a tiny number of super-rich investors and entrepreneurs.

Trade War And Austerity: The Final Stages Of US Capitalism

The Trump administration is imposing tariffs on a growing list of countries in a desperate effort to find leverage for protecting US interests abroad and to ostensibly re-industrialize the United States. Clearing the FOG speaks with Jon Jeter, author of "Class War in America: How the elites divide the nation by asking are you a worker or are you white?", about the motives behind the trade war and how this may impact both the global and domestic economies. Jeter explains that the United States is entering uncharted territory as it increasingly isolates itself from the rest of the world and hurtles toward another Great Depression. For the first time, the US may experience a situation in which the shelves are empty and families are unable to afford what is left.
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