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OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Saturday she had made clear in a meeting with U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Munich Security Conference the importance of the U.S. lifting tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada. Freeland said that while Canada is now focused on its domestic ratification process for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade deal, it remains strongly opposed to the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum. “The Canada position is now that we have concluded (USMCA) that is all the more reason why the tariffs must be lifted,” she...

Middle-Class Economics: USA Today ran a surprising story on Tuesday headlined "Can the middle-class revival under Trump last?" It's surprising — shocking really — because it might just be the first time a major news outlet has admitted that there has been a middle-class revival under Trump. We did a search for news stories that used the phrase "middle-class revival" since Trump took office. Other than the USAT story and a syndicated column written a year-and-a-half ago, we found none. Even a more generic search for "Trump middle class" turns up mostly stories about how Trump's tax cuts supposedly aren't...

U.S. manufacturing is once again in the news. New data shows America’s factories adding 261,000 jobs from January 2018 to January 2019. In the State of the Union, President Trump emphasized the urgency of confronting predatory trade from countries like China. There’s no doubt that America’s manufacturers are currently rebounding. The tariffs that President Trump imposed a year ago on steel, aluminum, solar panels and washing machines have already created more than 11,000 new jobs. Even U.S. car companies are doing well at home. Ford’s North American operations posted a $2 billion profit in the fourth quarter, while GM’s North...

United States Steel said Monday it will resume construction of a furnace in Alabama, adding 1.6 million tons of steelmaking capacity and hundreds of jobs. Construction on U.S. Steel’s mill in Jefferson County, Alabama, was suspended in 2015 after China’s overproduction caused a global steel glut that sent prices plummeting. The tariffs the Trump administration imposed last year have reduced the flow of foreign steel in the U.S. and allowed domestic makers to expand again. U.S. Steel Chief Executive Officer David Burritt said in a statement: Thanks to the President’s strong trade actions and improved market conditions, support from the...

The Wall Street Journal has been against Trump’s trade tariffs, and any chance they get they will put blame on the tariffs for bad things, even when it is obvious they are not to blame. On Thursday they had a front-page story which attributed a wave of Chapter 12 bankruptcies (50 total in the U.S.) partially to small tariffs put in place by Trump in 2018. Any business reporter with a brain knows that those small tariffs had nothing to do with bankruptcies that occurred in 2018. Those farmers had to be struggling with too much debt for years, and...

The U.S. trade deficit fell to $49.3 billion in November, the first decline after five straight months of increases. But on a year-over-year basis, the gap rose by 10.4 percent. The U.S trade deficit with its global partners fell in November for the first time after five straight months of increases as the shortfall with China and several other countries declined. Tightening the balance between imports and exports has been a major goal of the Trump administration, which last year started levying tariffs in an effort to close the gap. A release from the government Wednesday showed the gap had...

Videos at link. The White House took a victory lap Friday after the Labor Department announced 304,000 jobs were created in January, some 139,000 more than economists anticipated. “Three hundred-thousand new jobs plus, 3.2 percent increase in wages, participation rates went up, hours worked went up, it doesn’t get much better than this,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said in a video posted to the White House Twitter page. “I hate to say I told you so folks,” he added. “We’re going at 3 percent plus, and I don’t care, you can line up 8,000 pessimistas, and they’re wrong....

Full title: Newt Gingrich: Democrats and Never Trumpers will put Trump back in the White House in 2020 -- Here's whyAs you listen to the liberal media, the Never Trumpers and the left-wing Trump haters chatter on about President Trump’s current situation, remember these two numbers — 35 and 49. The first number was President Ronald Reagan’s approval in January 1983. The second number was the number of states Reagan carried 22 months later. I am not predicting President Trump will carry 49 states. This is a different environment, and the tribalism that divides the country is deeper than it...

Actual headline: POTUS Trump’s tariff strategy is working: China’s Communist Party increasingly worried about internal stability as economy slows As the Trump administration signals publicly that there is a ways to go before it reaches an equitable trade arrangement with Beijing, there are growing signs that China’s Communist Party is concerned that the ongoing trade war and decline in the country’s GDP could spark widespread unrest. On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the U.S. and China had “miles and miles” to go before reaching a deal, though a trade delegation from Beijing was headed to the United States in...

The former chief of the top Chinese lender to foreign countries pleaded with the government to avoid a tit-for-tat trade war with the United States, according to the transcript of a just-published speech from September. The speech by Li Ruogu, the one-time head of the Export and Import Bank of China (China EXIM), the massive state-owned lending institution that provides funding to foreign companies for the purchase of Chinese-made goods and services, provides new details regarding the Communist government’s internal struggle over how to react to and deal with the Trump administration’s aggressive tariff regime, the South China Morning Post...

Headline: CEO: POTUS Trump’s tariffs like ‘gun to the head’ of China, forcing Beijing to negotiate or suffer MASSIVE recession and unrestThe CEO of a U.S.-based global investment firm said Tuesday that POTUS Donald Trump’s tariff regime against China is having the desired effect of both slowing Beijing’s economy while “holding a gun to the head” of a county that is used to enormous economic growth. On Monday, the Chinese government announced in response to its slowest economic growth since 1990 that it was willing to spend as much as $1 trillion to close the yawning trade deficit with the...

The ban is a huge win for the administration and lays down another marker in its effort to tighten the sanctions noose around Tehran. A top Trump ambassador is winning kudos for his part in convincing Germany to ban Iranian airline Mahan Air amid allegations 'it ran weapons to Syria.'......Iran’s Mahan Air is shut down in Germany, immediately. “Since arriving in Berlin, Ambassador Grenell has literally hit the ground running delivering on the president’s priorities,” said a key ally and senior Senate Republican aide. “At the top of that list has been to ensure Europe doesn’t circumvent President Trump on...

One month since the start of the shutdown, the Trump 2020 campaign is chugging ahead with staffing and organization -- and even fundraised off the paralyzed federal government. But the shutdown may yet prove to be a drag on the campaign and help set the tone for the race, depending on how long it endures and how it gets resolved. The campaign's internal efforts have carried on as normal, in contrast to the chaos of a "rudderless" White House, as it was described by one administration official. "The campaign has more autonomy and direction than the White House," said one...

“This is a very, very big deal,” the Florida Republican and Cuban-American said...“I think really good things are coming from this. And so, you can't minimize the impact..... ”President Trump is getting ready to place an unprecedented amount of economic pressure on Cuba’s communism regime and some of the non-U.S. companies that have invested there, according to a leading Republican lawmaker. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has signaled that Americans who decades ago had property stolen by Fidel Castro’s regime and sold to other foreign companies may soon be able to sue those companies to recoup their losses. That will...

China’s 2018 economic growth fell to a three-decade low, adding to pressure on Beijing to settle a tariff war with Washington. The world’s second-largest economy expanded by 6.6 percent over a year earlier, down from 2017′s 6.9 percent, official data showed Monday. Growth in the three months ending in December dipped to 6.4 percent — the lowest quarterly level since the 2008 global crisis — from the previous quarter’s 6.5 percent. Communist leaders are trying to steer China to slower, more self-sustaining growth based on consumer spending instead of trade and investment. But the deceleration has been sharper than expected,...

My S&P500 account has gone up pretty good in the last few weeks after a bigger hit prior. If the price of gas is going more towards $2/gallon and China is backing down on trade I certainly see it as a cause and effect The only other big thing on the horizon I see is the prospect of a big beautiful wall. Too much collateral damage without one. I'm talking drugs, violence, hit and run vehicle accidents. Gotta get better if Trump is in office for 6 more. Things will never be perfect but tell me how much China and...

BEIJING/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is pushing for regular reviews of China’s progress on pledged trade reforms as a condition for a trade deal - and could again resort to tariffs if it deems Beijing has violated the agreement, according to sources briefed on negotiations to end the trade war between the two nations. A continuing threat of tariffs hanging over commerce between the world’s two largest economies would mean a deal would not end the risk of investing in businesses or assets that have been impacted by the trade war. “The threat of tariffs is not going away,...

China Proposes Six-Year Buying Spree Citing sources familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported Friday that China has offered to significantly boost its purchase of U.S. goods over a six-year period in an effort to re-balance trade between the two superpowers. By increasing its annual imports from the United States, Beijing would reduce its trade surplus to zero by 2024. That would require a spending boost of more than $1 trillion.

The United States is expected to churn out far more oil in 2019 than what international analysts originally forecasted. The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based organization that helps coordinate energy policies for industrial countries, released its latest oil market report Friday, noting exceptional numbers for the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The agency reported U.S. oil production is expected to rise by 1.3 million barrels a day in 2019. While this number is lower than the record-smashing 2.1 million increase producers enjoyed in 2018, it’s more than double what the IEA initially expected to see in 2019. The forecast illustrates the...

This morning, Dow Jones Industrial Average Futures Trading predicted a gain of over 130 points for the index at market opening . The US stock markets have been buoyed by news that trade tariffs could be eased or even rolled back.