I just posted the below as a comment but I figured I'd start a thread, too, because I'm curious and I feel like a week of obsessive news reading hasn't really shed any clarity on anything.
Now that China has refused to back down from Trump's escalation, I'm wondering how Trump is going to wiggle out of this one. He can announce a 90 day pause with some lie about how China begged him to come to the table to save face domestically, but that maneuver might not actually bring China to negotiations. China seems to be in "never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake" mode and I don't see them responding to something like a temporary pause.
The pro tariff crowd seems to be thinking that China will go into a recession before the US does, so the US will win the game of chicken, but China probably has more options for responding to a recession, especially given the fact that the government isn't a bunch of idiotic, bumbling aristocrats and the flight from the US bond market has continued. No one is going to want to lend us the money it'll take to weather a serious downturn given the fact that we're run by crazy people.
So, assuming Trump is made to see the warning lights again, what does he ask for? He has jiu-jitsu'd himself into a no-win position because reshoring all of the manufacturing that left four decades ago is a nonstarter. I guess he could demand that China agrees to import a certain amount of US goods to lower the trade deficit, but they made that offer last time and then immediately ignored it because why wouldn't they? It's unenforceable because any retaliatory action the US could take brings us right back here. So what is a non-idiotic offer to China to get talks started? What will their opening demands be?
I sure wish I was financially literate enough to understand how to protect myself from the accelerating collapse. I've squirreled away every dollar from my receptionist gig I could to try and buy a house of my own one day. It's still in cash because stocks always intimidated me. I have no idea if investing in SHCOMP would protect me since it's still traded in dollars. I'm also afraid it's going to end up with a unilateral decision by the federal government that US citizens aren't allowed to own Chinese shit and I'd end up losing everything. I'm halfway to just buying a bunch of fucking gold, and I always thought gold people were morons.
I have no idea if financial literacy would even help. I've been trying to find opinions on what to do and people who seem to have financial bona fides have variously said:
The most levelheaded-seeming opinion on what's happening right now noted that bond rates are higher than they've been recently, but they aren't unreasonably high given our current level of inflation and what's happening right now might just be a reversion to historical rates, which have been a lot higher before without the wheels falling off the American economy, so all the bond market reportage might be scaremongering. So who knows, maybe the American economy can weather this storm, too, even though from an objective perspective the stock market seems to be run by shrieking gibbons with the attention spans of houseflies. I guess I'm going to shop around for funds that have a low management fee and seem to do well relative to the S&P while having a bit more international exposure and assume that if the government ever decides it's illegal to own it and steals all my investments, there's probably worse shit going on.