Squeezing 2,000 lemons a day was such a pain for staff at Chick-fil-A Inc. that the company enlisted an army of robots to do it. In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average … Read More

The US’s latest move to expand its list of Chinese military companies risks doing more than tanking the shares of some of its most valuable companies: It also threatens to accelerate decoupling of the world’s biggest economies. The Biden administration on Monday added Tencent Holdings Ltd., the world’s largest gaming publisher, and Contemporary Amperex Technology … Read More

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered quixotic history which peddled the “Golden Arches theory” that no two countries hosting branches of McDonald’s would go to war with each other because of their mutually beneficial bonds of economic interdependence. Reducing barriers to trade and financial flows to a minimum and integrating China into the global … Read More

The plan to impose lower tariffs on 935 commodities “will help increase the imports of quality products,” according to a statement from the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council on Saturday, noting that the tariff reduction aligns with the need to foster new quality productive forces through scientific and technological innovation, enhance people’s well-being, … Read More

Trade data reflects this: The gap between the goods the United States exports to and imports from China narrowed to $278 billion in 2023 from $417 billion in 2018. While that level is set to rebound this year, economists say U.S. imports of goods from China that are covered by tariffs have clearly dropped. Some … Read More

China may start selling its products to Europe at discounted rates if the US starts a trade war by imposing new tariffs, according to European Central Bank Governing Council member Klaas Knot. In such a situation, “there is a chance that the Chinese will start offering their goods in Europe at lower and lower prices,” … Read More

In a New York Times op-ed on Friday, Eswar Prasad, senior professor of trade policy and professor of economics at Cornell University, pointed out that the U.S. is strong while the rest of the world is in “a deep economic funk,” enabling it to weather a tariff war better. “No matter the virtues of these … Read More

The US Treasury Department was hacked by a Chinese state-sponsored actor through a third-party software service provider, according to a letter the agency sent to Congress on Monday. Treasury described the intrusion as a “major cybersecurity incident,” since it was attributed to a state-sponsored actor, according to the letter, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News. … Read More

The imposition of tariffs is likely to mean a stronger U.S. dollar, which will make American exports more expensive. That undercuts Mr. Trump’s goal of reducing the trade deficit, but it will also pull in more investment from the rest of the world. The Trump tariffs will certainly force other countries to be creative in … Read More

Economists Have Drawn the Wrong Lessons From the Failures of the 1930s. Tariffs are neither a panacea nor necessarily injurious. Their effectiveness, like that of any economic policy intervention, depends on the circumstances under which they are implemented. In the end, tariffs are simply one among many tools that can improve economic outcomes under some … Read More