President Tariff Man may be learning all the wrong lessons from his trade wars. Specifically: that higher tariffs work.
U.S. and Chinese officials are meeting in Washington this week for another round of trade negotiations. If recent reporting proves correct, the talks look likely to result in a commitment to … keep talking. Also possibly a series of vague, unenforceable "memorandums of understanding."
If that's what ends up happening, markets are likely to celebrate. Not because this will represent progress, necessarily. Mostly because it might signal a reprieve from a highly feared scenario: that President Trump would follow through with threats to ratchet up tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods from his already destructive rate of 10 percent to a possibly disastrous 25 percent after March 1.