Extension of US-China talks?; More policy support for private enterprises; Wrong kind of Marxists

Apologies for the corrected newsletter yesterday, and the new typo I added when I sent it…one of those days. Generally I will note any meaningful typos in my Twitter feed but yesterday’s was important enough to clog your inboxes twice.

The big news today is a Bloomberg report that the US and China will likely agree to a 60 day extension of the trade negotiations. Maybe the talks are going well this week, and perhaps we will see either a joint statement or even a draft MOU by the weekend, but if the talks are extended I consider that a win for Beijing.

Beijing will have more time to find and exploit various avenues to pressure President Trump to agree to a lesser deal, and pushing the negotiations closer to the start of the 2020 US election cycle may also increase the political pressure on the US President to compromise. Xi and his team are likely calculating that the shutdown debacle and Trump’s loss over the border wall funding also add to the pressure on Trump to show a “win”.

The i…