Posted on 06/05/2025 7:50:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A call between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken place, according to Chinese state media.
The bulletin from China was not immediately confirmed by Trump or his team. It offered no immediate details about the call itself other than to say the talks took place and that they happened at Trump's request.
Either way, the apparent call would be a significant step in Trump's highest-stakes trade talks and the first time Trump and Xi have spoken since Trump's inauguration.
The long-awaited call also comes at a fraught moment for US-China trade talks, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described as "stalled."
The path toward an eventual trade deal with China — or at least continued deescalation after a trade truce in May lowered tariffs by 115 percentage points for 90 days — has been in question, especially after a recent Trump social media missive took aim at Xi personally by saying that dealing with the leader is "extremely hard."
Thursday's apparent call was the latest step in a rapid-fire series of developments this week across three continents offering caution that trade tensions could rise this summer after weeks of talk around the notion that markets may be calmed by a TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") trade.
Regarding China, Trump hailed the pact inked in May as a "total reset," but it has looked increasingly fragile in recent days. Both sides have charged in recent days that the other is cheating, and significant unresolved issues, from critical minerals to semiconductors, are looming.
Trump and his team say China has already violated the 90-day truce by not loosening trade restrictions on critical minerals.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
China’s entire edifice is built on cheating. They are the hardest nut to crack. I wish the president good luck in making progress.
The administration is avoiding focus and the media reported it, and also avoided focus, but make no mistake here. China holds the high hand. Monumentally high hand.
The media words it rare earth metals and sometimes, not often, rare earth magnets. They don’t really understand. Neodymium defines every magnet in the US and Europe and more or less everywhere. This became the norm over 20-30 yrs.
Every electric motor has to have neodymium. That’s every fan in every computer, every alternator in every gasoline car, every motor driving the wheels in EVs, every EVERYTHING and China is not interested in doing a deal for more printed pieces of paper from the US Treasury in return for a society defining item.
They are very smart. Their neodymium isn’t going anywhere that might trade it to the US, either. So Russia will get all it wants. India will not.
Do we have our own neodymium? Yes, we could put together necessary processing and mining to produce it — in about 5-10 yrs. Until then, China has no reason to bail out Trump.
It is the single item that makes us far more desperate than they are. Walmart wants its supply chain left alone. China knows they can punish Trump for daring to propose anything negative for China.
It’s not a good configuration.
Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin recently analyzed coal ash collected from power plants across the country and found that the country’s coal ash reserves could contain up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements. That’s nearly eight times the amount of rare earths that the United States already has in reserve, and could be worth approximately $8.4 billion.
I think China needs to be told that we will no longer trade with them, that we will no longer sell any U.S. to a Chinese that is not a U.S. citizen or has any connection to the CPR & furthermore any person owning land here & working in any capacity with the CPR shall be required to grant that land back to the U.S. owner.
So the massive trade surplus China has doesn’t weaken that monumentally high hand? Not buying it comrade. Back under the bridge troll
The surplus in question are printed pieces of paper, by the US Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China. Neither will mean much if you can’t have AC in the summertime.
I thought Xi was in trouble.
A China travel ban would effect the Chinese spy network...The CCP wouldn't like that.
Make the trade deal. Deal with the spies later after the deal is final.
WTF are you talking about? So all the plastic junk I see all over that says “made in China” is really pieces of paper? If you are worried about the US treasuries China owns, I don’t think their economy could take a trillion dolllar hit at the moment of they sell them all. You clearly aren’t a conservative and I am guessing not even American.
The surplus, or deficit, is measured in currency. It’s not measured in the number of pieces of plastic shipped. It’s measured in the price applied to them.
When a factor is introduced that is outside the computation of printed pieces of paper, the world of economics falls apart. This happened in the 1970s when the Arabs embargoed oil. Texas could not make up the difference. The number of dollars involved could also not make up any difference. Oil became a currency unto itself.
Neodymium threatens to be a duplicate of that situation. Not treasury holdings. China’s holdings are not all that substantial. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about neodymium and it’s vital role in society and their monopoly of it.
Do we have our own neodymium? Yes, it’s underground. Do we have the necessary refining and processing facilities to get use of it. No. And it would be 10 years to be able to generate the quantities we need.
China’s hand is the high hand, and it’s overwhelmingly high because of the vital aspect of neodymium.
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