Trump got rolled by China and he doesn’t even know it yet. This “deal” is FAR from concluded. Key rule in China ….. it only after you sign a deal that you actually begin to negotiate.

China Morning Missive Agree on a framework? I’m not even sure what that means. From what I can tell, the parties agreed, for the time being, that the US would lift certain restrictions which were placed on China in the past two weeks and, in return, China would begin allowing the export of rare earth minerals. Beyond this, all that looks to have been achieved is for the two sides to continue building a broader list of issues which will be discussed over time. I need to see what sort of messaging comes out of Beijing later this morning. That will provide a counterbalance to the reporting now coming out from the American media outlets. https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/10/business/us-china-trade-talks-london-agreement-intl-hnk

Not sure what this could possibly mean, but Chinese markets reopened for afternoon trading and dived. Nothing news worthy out of London and the ongoing trade talks. At least nothing made public. Could be a volatile day ahead. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-10/chinese-stocks-lead-sudden-dip-in-risk-assets-before-trade-talks

Wife actually picked up the Pura X last month. The now-fully-Chinese OS clearly “borrowed” liberally from the folks in Cupertino.

Here’s another quick #China update. There was a sudden surge in gold buying here in Shanghai over the weekend. You can see here in the attached video. The catalyst was a round of household vouchers issued by the local government. Basically, a series of different vouchers were made available including Rmb150 on a Rmb500 purchase all the way up to Rmb1,000 for a Rmb10,000 purchase. In the very savvy Chinese fashion, rather than use the vouchers for the intended purpose, to incentivize consumer discretionary spending like washing machine or clothing or some other more typical consumer item, the vouchers were used to buy gold. No prohibitions were made on how the vouchers were to be used. The gold shops even got with the program promoting the opportunity. Most point-of-sales were between 1 and 5 grams.

China Morning Missive You’d think there’s genuine drama going on here. That might be the case in Washington, but it’s just another Tuesday here in China. It was three months ago when the Trump team said that a call with Xi was coming any day. That never transpired and all that followed was bellicosity via social media. Trump was then bombarded by Walmart and Costco making it clear that the shelves would be empty in a matter of weeks. Voila! A meeting is then announced in Geneva. The parties both said that progress was made. Thing is, the Chinese decided to slow roll access to rare earth minerals. For me, it was a test to measure the level of desperation on the American side. Seems that desperation was rather intense. And thus began round two of the Trump rage machine. In case you had any doubts, there won’t be any call, at least there’ll be no call initiated by the Chinese side. American buyers continue to scramble to place orders with Chinese producers before tariffs are - inevitably - returned to the +100% level. It is a mad scramble based on the people I’ve been talking to over the holiday weekend. Perhaps all of this is to say, volatility is back in play. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-chinas-xi-will-likely-speak-this-week-white-house-says-2025-06-02/

While EV charging is, of course, an option here in #China you can also just go and have your entire battery changed out on roughly 6 minutes.