China has retaliated with tariffs of its own, though the administration is banking on the idea that the U.S. ultimately will prevail in a tit-for-tat battle. The U.S. ran a $376 billion trade deficit with China in calendar year 2017 and that number was $152 billion for the first five months of 2018, according to Census Bureau data.
Trump’s chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, said at the Delivering Alpha conference last week that he does not like tariffs but also believes they can be effective in trying to level the playing field in trade.
Earlier in the morning Tuesday, Trump insisted in a separate tweet that the tariffs his administration has imposed are working to bring other countries to the bargaining table.
The remarks are similar to tweets back in March when Trump said “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
Voters generally disagree with the president’s positions.
In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 49 percent of respondents said the tariffs would raise the cost of goods and hurt the economy, while just 25 percent said they would preserve American jobs and help the economy.
Investors, though, have largely shrugged off the controversy.
The S&P 500 is up 5 percent for the year about 1.9 percent over the last month, despite the Trump saber-rattling on trade and other issues.
In an interview Thursday with CNBC, the president even threatened to impose tariffs on all $505 billion of goods the U.S. imports from China. Stocks mostly unchanged since the remarks.
Ed Mills, the Washington policy analyst at Raymond James, said the rest of the year has much in store that investors will need to watch closely.
“In recent months we have seen Trump increasingly operate on a go it alone strategy, relying more in his personal instincts and less on input from advisors. We expect these tendencies to continue and shape the direction of policy decisions in the near-term, leading to potentially binary outcomes,” Mills said in a note.
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