BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Finito World
So the trade war is on pause. Again. After months of spiralling tariffs, backroom sniping, and the usual digital bombast from Donald Trump’s pulpit of choice, the world’s two largest economies have agreed to dial it down—for 90 days. The markets, ever eager for good news, have duly bounced. Geneva, neutral and expensive, has played host to the world’s most expensive game of chicken. And for now, neither side has blinked.
The terms are familiar enough: the US will reduce its sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods to a still-punishing 30%, down from a ludicrous 145%. In return, China will lower its duties on US imports to 10%, and both countries will keep talking. The implication? We are, as one analyst put it, back to square one—but with slightly cleaner fingernails and a much stronger yuan.
In Beijing, the mood is not just upbeat—it is quietly triumphant. Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations notes that China will read this not as a mutual gesture, but as a US retreat. She may be right. China is in a “psychologically stronger position,” she says—and it’s not hard to see why. It survived Trump’s tariff tantrums, it has absorbed the economic shocks, and now, with the US stepping back, Beijing feels the wind subtly changing.
But what does this really mean—not just for stock markets or trade corridors, but for the longer-term question of economic balance and employability in the West?
At first glance, the deal looks like common sense. Tariffs of over 100% are not policy; they’re sabotage. No economy can operate with that level of friction and expect to avoid fallout in jobs, wages, and prices. And yet, this entire saga has exposed a deep vulnerability in both economies: for all their rhetoric about self-reliance, both remain structurally dependent on one another.
The US still needs cheap Chinese components to build things. China still needs access to American consumers to sell them. The truth—boring, inconvenient, but persistent—is that globalisation happened, and cannot be simply reversed by executive order.
And yet that hasn’t stopped Trump from trying. His economic nationalism is premised on a neat fiction: that American decline is the result of Chinese trickery, rather than domestic policy failure. That if only the playing field were level, American manufacturing would roar back to life, unburdened by bureaucracy or unions. It’s an idea that plays well in the Rust Belt—and disastrously everywhere else.
China, for its part, plays a longer game. It speaks the language of cooperation but subsidises with impunity. It talks of fair trade while pouring state money into industrial policy. It signs agreements—only to ignore the fine print. The truth is that the US and China are not playing the same game. One is improvising in real time. The other is executing a thirty-year strategy.
This latest truce, then, is not a real reset—it’s a stalling tactic. The structural issues remain: IP theft, market access, overcapacity in key sectors. None of that is fixed in 90 days. Nor is the fundamental question: can the US create a workforce that competes with China’s on innovation, on speed, and, crucially, on price?
The employability angle here is inescapable. If America wants to wean itself off Chinese supply chains, it must invest in skills, vocational training, and domestic manufacturing at a scale unseen since the Second World War. It must train welders and chip designers, solar engineers and robotics technicians. And crucially, it must convince a sceptical electorate that such a shift is worth it—that reshoring isn’t just a slogan, but a strategy.
The UK, too, should take note. It has managed to slip in the back door of this tariff détente, securing a favourable deal of its own. But that same question of competitiveness looms large here too. If tariffs go down but the skills gap remains, what is actually achieved?
There is, of course, something almost operatic about this entire drama. Two superpowers circling one another, each convinced of its own rectitude, neither quite able to quit the other. For now, the opera pauses. The curtain falls. But the music, discordant and persistent, plays on.
And so the world watches, as it always does—hoping that this time, they might mean it.
