Bridgewater’s Dalio Warns: “Trump Is Playing Chicken With China”
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 06/20/2018
Having explained in May why “there won’t be a trade war anytime soon” and shrugging off trade war anxiety “because of the wisdom of Chinese leaders,” it appears Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio is shifting his position.
A wise Chinese leader who I will keep unnamed told me that it pays to negotiate by finding out what the other party wants most and try to give it to them and to have them reciprocate rather than to find out what will hurt the other party and give that to them because little wars have a tendency to quickly get out of control to become big wars and anyone who has ever gotten into a big war wishes that they hadn’t because they are so horrible. He referred to World War I as the classic example, while noting that it was true for most wars. He hopes that the Chinese-US trade disagreement doesn’t move from a dispute to a war of any sort.
What is moving the disagreement from a dispute to a war is the fact that there are no international rules or international organizations (like WTO) that the disagreeing parties are willing to go to for binding arbitration, so they use carrots and sticks to test each other’s strengths, pushing each other until one backs down. Because Chinese and American leaders have all sorts of carrots and sticks (e.g., economic, military, cyber, etc.) that they can use, they are now determining which ones to use, how far to push the testing, and how far the other will go in inflicting pain and enduring it. The escalations come in the form of tit-for-tats—i.e., a series of escalations that can become progressively larger and more painful, and that take different forms that can extend beyond trade (e.g., to include capital wars). It’s this series of escalations that the wise Chinese leader that I referred to conveyed can easily get beyond anyone’s control.
The Rest…HERE
