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Harvesting in a trade war: U.S. crops rot as storage costs soar

MTAtech

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[h=1]Harvesting in a trade war: U.S. crops rot as storage costs soar[/h]
(Reuters) - U.S. farmers finishing their harvests are facing a big problem - where to put the mountain of grain they cannot sell to Chinese buyers.
...
Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.

This is what happens when you put a moron in charge of trade policy -- Trump's incompetence at governing is showing.

DscxvhbV4AEQ1Ps.jpg:large
 
This is what happens when you put a moron in charge of trade policy -- Trump's incompetence at governing is showing.

DscxvhbV4AEQ1Ps.jpg:large

I figure by 2020 even the Trumpsters will notice. Of course they'll blame the Democrats.
 
This is what happens when you put a moron in charge of trade policy -- Trump's incompetence at governing is showing.

DscxvhbV4AEQ1Ps.jpg:large

It's what happens when you government subsidize farming :/

We are winning out on the trade war with China... I think we made 20ish billion, lost 4-6 Billion.

Markets change.
 
I figure by 2020 even the Trumpsters will notice. Of course they'll blame the Democrats.
During the midterm campaign, they interviewed farmers who were still behind him because they believed {I think falsely} that "in the long-run" they'd be better. However, as Keynes famously said, "in the long run, we're all dead." I think you are right. After a few years of suffering from shoot-from-the-hip policies, they'll turn on him too.
 
Yip and as farmers generally finance from season to season many are very worried about being able to afford seed for next year's planting...
 
Bottom line, China needs us a thousand times more than we need them.

Is that so, when is the last time they.borrowed money from us to keep there government open or to pay for tax cuts???

China will just buy up farms as they go out of business, just as they have been doing for years...
 
It's what happens when you government subsidize farming :/

We are winning out on the trade war with China... I think we made 20ish billion, lost 4-6 Billion.

Markets change.
What do you mean by "we made 20ish billion, lost 4-6 Billion?" I think that you believe that if the balance of trade shifts, that's a good thing. What you don't consider is that corporations have invested trillions based on the assumption that an open world trading system, permitting value-added chains that sprawl across national borders, was going to be a permanent fixture of the environment. A trade war is disrupting all these investments, stranding a lot of capital.

I also don't know where your numbers come from but others say this: Trump's Trade War With China: The US is Not Winning

President Donald Trump’s 'America First' trade policies have led to a 94 per cent cut in US soybean exports to China, forcing farmers in America’s midwest to stockpile crops and hope relief comes before the rot.
 
Is that so, when is the last time they.borrowed money from us to keep there government open or to pay for tax cuts???

China will just buy up farms as they go out of business, just as they have been doing for years...

We borrowed to pay for entitlements not tax cuts. Without a terrible Obama economy that is no longer necessary.

Without ridiculous trade advantages China cant afford toilet paper little lone farms.
 
We borrowed to pay for entitlements not tax cuts. Without a terrible Obama economy that is no longer necessary.

Without ridiculous trade advantages China cant afford toilet paper little lone farms.

Holy delusional Batman...
 
What do you mean by "we made 20ish billion, lost 4-6 Billion?" I think that you believe that if the balance of trade shifts, that's a good thing. What you don't consider is that corporations have invested trillions based on the assumption that an open world trading system, permitting value-added chains that sprawl across national borders, was going to be a permanent fixture of the environment. A trade war is disrupting all these investments, stranding a lot of capital.

I also don't know where your numbers come from but others say this: Trump's Trade War With China: The US is Not Winning

Holy delusional Batman...


LOL..."the assumption that an open world trading system"

You think we had a open trading system with China? xD

The whole point of this is because China has been repeatedly violating trade agreement and has completely unfair trade policy's with the USA. Do you have any idea what it's like for an American to try to do business in China? Any Idea?

Just to give you a few examples...
-American companies cannot operate in China without sharing their technology and have a Chinese company partnership... and even then that privileged can be revoked at any time on a whim with no due process. No foreigner or Foreigner Company has any due process whatsoever, they will lose almost every lawsuit in China, the times where they do not lose is if the government feels their is a net benefit to China.

-Their are hundreds of additional laws, taxes, regulations, and censorship that just cover American business alone.

- Only 10 American movies can be shown a year in China, and they are also heavily censored. This also affects how movies are made back home in order to pass censorship in China.

-Online American business is blocked by firewall. Only Chinese companies with permission are allowed to do buisness with foreigners online.

- Foreigners in China can only stay in the most expensive hotels in every city... 80% of hotels in China do not allow foreigners.

- China subsidizes their shipping industry to make it essentially free for Chinese companies and manufacturing.... artificially making the USA reliant on their goods.

It doesn't end here...
China is CONSTANTLY stealing our technology. They have government funded hackers that CONSTANTLY attack our universities, banks, corporations, whatever on a daily basis looking for technology, research and vulnerabilities. Chinese spies are sent to steal genetic farming and medical research, and they are caught very often. Literally one seed stolen can be billions of dollars down the drain.

It doesn't end there either. I won't even bring up the debt shark practices China does with other countries and how their entire economic strategy is to take down the US economy, not mutually benefit from it.

China has vowed to be able to invade Taiwan by 2020. They have LITERALLY officially said this... And I hope you know of all the other military drama they have been involved in the last decade.... They also support the North Korean regime...

Seriously... How can you justify ANYTHING you are saying?
All of your best arguments are equivalent to a wife who is being beaten half to death every night, but she should not leave him because she will no longer have financial support.
 
We borrowed to pay for entitlements not tax cuts. Without a terrible Obama economy that is no longer necessary.

Without ridiculous trade advantages China cant afford toilet paper little lone farms.
For such a short post so many levels of errors.

First, Obama inherited a terrible economy and immediately instituted that reversed negative economic decline within 6-9 months -- and handed over to Trump an economy with a 4.x% unemployment rate.

fredgraph.png


Second, China is among the players that lend the U.S. Treasury money so that we can run deficits year-after-year. What the U.S. chooses to do with those deficits is well known.

Third, bemoaning that China couldn't afford toilet paper without "ridiculous trade advantages" -- which are basically, the ability and willingness to sell goods cheaper than anyone else, is like saying that Tom Brady wouldn't be in the NFL if he wasn't a great quarterback. The fact is that Brady IS a great quarterback and China DOES have advantages.
 
LOL..."the assumption that an open world trading system"

You think we had a open trading system with China? xD

The whole point of this is because China has been repeatedly violating trade agreement and has completely unfair trade policy's with the USA. Do you have any idea what it's like for an American to try to do business in China? Any Idea?

Just to give you a few examples...
-American companies cannot operate in China without sharing their technology and have a Chinese company partnership... and even then that privileged can be revoked at any time on a whim with no due process. No foreigner or Foreigner Company has any due process whatsoever, they will lose almost every lawsuit in China, the times where they do not lose is if the government feels their is a net benefit to China.
...
It doesn't end here...
China is CONSTANTLY stealing our technology. They have government funded hackers that CONSTANTLY attack our universities, banks, corporations, whatever on a daily basis looking for technology, research and vulnerabilities. Chinese spies are sent to steal genetic farming and medical research, and they are caught very often. Literally one seed stolen can be billions of dollars down the drain.

It doesn't end there either. I won't even bring up the debt shark practices China does with other countries and how their entire economic strategy is to take down the US economy, not mutually benefit from it.

China has vowed to be able to invade Taiwan by 2020. They have LITERALLY officially said this... And I hope you know of all the other military drama they have been involved in the last decade.... They also support the North Korean regime...

Seriously... How can you justify ANYTHING you are saying?
All of your best arguments are equivalent to a wife who is being beaten half to death every night, but she should not leave him because she will no longer have financial support.

Did you know that GM earns more revenue in China than in the U.S.? I didn't think so.

To be fair, China really is a bad actor in the global economy. In particular, it has pretty much thumbed its nose at international rules on intellectual property rights, grabbing foreign technology without proper payment. Trump officials do sometimes raise the intellectual property issue as a justification for getting tough.

But if getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S. both to make specific demands on that front and to adopt a strategy aimed at inducing China to meet those demands.

In fact, the U.S. has given little indication of what China should do about intellectual property. Meanwhile, if getting better protection of patent rights and so on were the goal, America should be trying to build a coalition with other advanced countries to pressure the Chinese; instead, we’ve been alienating everyone in sight.

Anyway, what seems to really bother Trump aren’t China’s genuine policy sins, but its trade surplus with the United States, which he has repeatedly said is $500 billion a year. (It’s actually less than $340 billion, but who’s counting?) This trade surplus, he insists, means that China is winning -- in effect stealing $500 billion a year from America.

As many economists and economic writers have pointed out, this is junk economics. Except at times of mass unemployment, trade deficits aren’t a subtraction from the economies that run them, nor are trade surpluses an addition to the economies on the other side of the imbalance. Over all, the U.S. trade deficit is just the flip side of the fact that America attracts more inward investment from foreigners than the amount Americans invest abroad. Trade policy has nothing to do with it.

Beyond this conceptual confusion, there’s a raw fact few people -- and, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Trump administration -- seem to appreciate: China no longer runs big trade surpluses.

The U.S. and China's so unbalanced trad is a statistical illusion.

China is the Great Assembler: it’s where components from other countries, like Japan and South Korea, are put together into consumer products for the U.S. market. So a lot of what we import from China is really produced elsewhere.

It’s not clear why we should demand that China stop playing that role. Indeed, it’s not clear that China could even do much to reduce its bilateral surplus with the U.S.: To do so, it would basically have to have a completely different economy. And this just isn’t going to happen unless we have a full-blown trade war that shuts down much of the global economy as we know it -- and that would be bad for everyone.
 
For such a short post so many levels of errors.

First, Obama inherited a terrible economy and immediately instituted that reversed negative economic decline within 6-9 months -- and handed over to Trump an economy with a 4.x% unemployment rate.

fredgraph.png


Second, China is among the players that lend the U.S. Treasury money so that we can run deficits year-after-year. What the U.S. chooses to do with those deficits is well known.

Third, bemoaning that China couldn't afford toilet paper without "ridiculous trade advantages" -- which are basically, the ability and willingness to sell goods cheaper than anyone else, is like saying that Tom Brady wouldn't be in the NFL if he wasn't a great quarterback. The fact is that Brady IS a great quarterback and China DOES have advantages.

Feel free to mention the Obama policies that improved the economy?

Under Obama Taco Bell and McDonald's did alot of hiring, and Obamacare turned a lot of full time jobs into multiple part time jobs.

Obama left office saying Trump would have to wave a "magic wand" to create good paying manufacturing jobs. Well manufacturing jobs have increased at the fastest rate in 50 years.

Leftist policies from people like Obama caused the last recession. Obama is why it was the slowest recovery in US History.

Regarding China: you just are flat out not keeping up with current events.
 
Did you know that GM earns more revenue in China than in the U.S.? I didn't think so.

To be fair, China really is a bad actor in the global economy. In particular, it has pretty much thumbed its nose at international rules on intellectual property rights, grabbing foreign technology without proper payment. Trump officials do sometimes raise the intellectual property issue as a justification for getting tough.

But if getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S. both to make specific demands on that front and to adopt a strategy aimed at inducing China to meet those demands.

In fact, the U.S. has given little indication of what China should do about intellectual property. Meanwhile, if getting better protection of patent rights and so on were the goal, America should be trying to build a coalition with other advanced countries to pressure the Chinese; instead, we’ve been alienating everyone in sight.

Anyway, what seems to really bother Trump aren’t China’s genuine policy sins, but its trade surplus with the United States, which he has repeatedly said is $500 billion a year. (It’s actually less than $340 billion, but who’s counting?) This trade surplus, he insists, means that China is winning -- in effect stealing $500 billion a year from America.

As many economists and economic writers have pointed out, this is junk economics. Except at times of mass unemployment, trade deficits aren’t a subtraction from the economies that run them, nor are trade surpluses an addition to the economies on the other side of the imbalance. Over all, the U.S. trade deficit is just the flip side of the fact that America attracts more inward investment from foreigners than the amount Americans invest abroad. Trade policy has nothing to do with it.

Beyond this conceptual confusion, there’s a raw fact few people -- and, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Trump administration -- seem to appreciate: China no longer runs big trade surpluses.

The U.S. and China's so unbalanced trad is a statistical illusion.

China is the Great Assembler: it’s where components from other countries, like Japan and South Korea, are put together into consumer products for the U.S. market. So a lot of what we import from China is really produced elsewhere.

It’s not clear why we should demand that China stop playing that role. Indeed, it’s not clear that China could even do much to reduce its bilateral surplus with the U.S.: To do so, it would basically have to have a completely different economy. And this just isn’t going to happen unless we have a full-blown trade war that shuts down much of the global economy as we know it -- and that would be bad for everyone.

Yes, I did...

And I don't care about intellectual property.

What I care about is everything I mentioned that you so conveniently skipped lol...

You mention a lot about what China is, but nothing about it what it could be.... that China is actively working against. It could be a hub for free and fair trade between the US and China... but right now it's entirely a one way street. You mention how the international corporations benefit from China, and well of course they do, and I am not convinced the benefit of the international corporation is to the benefit of America's future.... They could also benefit from a country other than China if they move. Which is what I want.
 
Feel free to mention the Obama policies that improved the economy?

Under Obama Taco Bell and McDonald's did alot of hiring, and Obamacare turned a lot of full time jobs into multiple part time jobs.

Obama left office saying Trump would have to wave a "magic wand" to create good paying manufacturing jobs. Well manufacturing jobs have increased at the fastest rate in 50 years.

Leftist policies from people like Obama caused the last recession. Obama is why it was the slowest recovery in US History.

Regarding China: you just are flat out not keeping up with current events.
We can have entire threads about what Obama did for the economy -- and we have. Trying, at this point, to not think of anything Obama did to aid the economy is cheer denial and it isn't this thread's topic. We had the stimulus, jobs act, reinsurance of unemployment benefits and cash for clunkers, for a few.

A) manufacturing jobs, they have been on a multi-year upward trend. B) Obama never said the "magic wand" thing about manufacturing jobs --you are just quoting Trump, misquoting Obama. What Obama DID say was that Trump would need a magic wand to get 4% (annual) growth. We haven't had 4% annual growth.

fredgraph.png
 
Feel free to mention the Obama policies that improved the economy?

Under Obama Taco Bell and McDonald's did alot of hiring, and Obamacare turned a lot of full time jobs into multiple part time jobs.

Obama left office saying Trump would have to wave a "magic wand" to create good paying manufacturing jobs. Well manufacturing jobs have increased at the fastest rate in 50 years.

Leftist policies from people like Obama caused the last recession. Obama is why it was the slowest recovery in US History.

Regarding China: you just are flat out not keeping up with current events.
You can assert many things, all of them are false. The charts below prove it.

Trump said, "Obama said Trump would have to wave a "magic wand" to create good paying manufacturing jobs." Obama ACTUALLY said, 'was that Trump would need a magic wand to get 4% (annual) growth. We haven't had 4% annual growth.' (see post #17). The misrepresentation of Obama's record are astounding lies that don't hold up to the most cavalier scrutiny.

Notice the drop in full time jobs and increase in part-time jobs after Obamacare became law? Me neither.

fredgraph.png


fredgraph.png
 
This is what happens when you put a moron in charge of trade policy -- Trump's incompetence at governing is showing.

DscxvhbV4AEQ1Ps.jpg:large

Yesterday I volunteered to distribute food boxes. I was extremely surprised to find half gallons of milk, that we had to put in the boxes. We have never given milk in the 5 years that I have been volunteering. There was so much milk that we gave them 6 half gallon jugs per box and there was still a lot left over. The organizer said it was because of tariffs with Canada. I do not know if thats true but it sure makes sense.
 
Yesterday I volunteered to distribute food boxes. I was extremely surprised to find half gallons of milk, that we had to put in the boxes. We have never given milk in the 5 years that I have been volunteering. There was so much milk that we gave them 6 half gallon jugs per box and there was still a lot left over. The organizer said it was because of tariffs with Canada. I do not know if thats true but it sure makes sense.
I hope that isn't true. Dairy farmers have it tough enough without Washington know-nothings making it worse.
 
This is what happens when you put a moron in charge of trade policy -- Trump's incompetence at governing is showing.

DscxvhbV4AEQ1Ps.jpg:large

This is a necessary bullet we have to bite. The moron was Obama and his foreign policy of appeasing tyrannical nations and letting them abuse US benevolence. I'm glad Trump is taking on China, there will undoubtedly be some pain in areas but it is necessary.
 
This is a necessary bullet we have to bite. The moron was Obama and his foreign policy of appeasing tyrannical nations and letting them abuse US benevolence. I'm glad Trump is taking on China, there will undoubtedly be some pain in areas but it is necessary.
What, exactly do you think we are gaining? In other words, what objective are you looking to solve?

According to the Financial Times, China is winning the trade war with America for now.

Last week the US government released data showing that America’s deficit in traded goods with China jumped 4.3 per cent in September to a seasonally adjusted level of $37.4bn, a record high. This was due to a thumping 8 per cent rise in American imports from China. Exports, however, remained broadly flat. And while monthly data are notoriously unreliable, the trend is clear: in the third quarter as a whole, America’s deficit with China reached $106bn, up from $92.9bn in the same period last year, also due to a startling rise in imports. For the year to September, the tally was $305.4bn, compared with $276.6bn last year.
...
China might actually be winning the optics (if not substance) of the early round of the trade fight. “The expansion of the US trade deficit with China . . . is a sign the trade war went against America” in September, Panjiva, a trade data aggregation service observed last week. Or as Soren Skou, the chief executive of AP Moller-Maersk, the shipping company, noted during an earnings call on Tuesday: “It is an ironic development, but after Trump has turned up the volume, the US has only increased their imports from China even more” — even as American exports in sectors such as soyabeans have collapsed.

The Maersk CEO also warned that China is having an easier time finding substitutes for U.S. products than the U.S. is in replacing Chinese imports.
 
We borrowed to pay for entitlements not tax cuts. Without a terrible Obama economy that is no longer necessary.

Without ridiculous trade advantages China cant afford toilet paper little lone farms.

What an ignorant statement this is......
 
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