Trump: Handelskrig är bra - Strafftull på stål och aluminium

Chancellor Angela Merkel has offered government support to efforts to open up Germany to U.S. gas, a key concession to President Trump as he tries to loosen Russia’s grip on Europe’s largest energy market.

Over breakfast this month, the chancellor told a small group of lawmakers her government had decided to co-finance the construction of a €500 million ($576 million) liquefied natural gas shipping terminal in northern Germany, according to people familiar with the meeting, giving a crucial nudge to a project that had failed to get off the ground for years in a country that gets most of its gas cheaply from Russia.

Mr. Trump has intensively lobbied Europe to buy significant amounts of LNG as part of his campaign to rewrite the terms of trade relations. German and U.S. officials said Berlin hoped embracing U.S. gas might help solve a protracted trade dispute and possibly even defuse threats by Washington to sanction Nord Stream 2, an unbuilt German-Russian gas pipeline that would double Russia’s existing gas export capacity to Germany.

During the first round of tariff negotiations, in June, the iPhone and other consumer electronics joined the slate of other goods for fresh tariffs. Despite being China’s most valuable export category to the U.S., key electronics (including the iPhone) were notably spared at the last minute.

Not every business has been as lucky as Apple, even though the logic—that tariffs harm domestic consumers and, therefore, domestic companies—surely applies to others.

Trump has said that small-business owners are the “engine of American prosperity,” though his trade policies have been the engineering equivalent of pouring water in the gas tank.

Tariffs place additional burdens on domestic firms, who must pay more for input materials, and in response, must raise prices to their customers.

As is evident with Apple, large companies with political sway have the ability to get key exemptions, while small businesses are left without protection from tariffs’ consequences.