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President Donald Trump’s two-day stop in China saw the signing of $250 billion in deals between the world’s two biggest economies and the two countries aligning themselves closer in resolute opposition to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

But analysts say little new ground was broken on trade or North Korea, an issue that will continue to top President Trump’s agenda as he travels to Vietnam and attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

And the true test of the feel-good foundation forged during the meetings, analysts said, is likely to come in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Big deal?

By design, the $250 billion sum of the deals was meant to provide a sharp contrast to the $300-500 billion deficit that exists between the United States and China, something Trump called “horrible” before departing for his 12-day trip to Asia.

Chinese state media have kicked into overdrive hailing the visit as a huge success. Media reports have highlighted the tone of the meetings, repeatedly noting the total amount of the deals.

An editorial in the official China Daily Friday said, “Although the differences that had been pestering bilateral ties have not instantly disappeared, the most important takeaway from their talks in Beijing has been the constructive approach to these issue the two leaders demonstrated.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called the meeting “historic.”

“We will definitely write a new chapter in the U.S.-Chinese relations. We will definitely make a new contribution to realize a beautiful future for U.S.-Chinese relations,” Xi said at a banquet Thursday evening.

Whether the “historic” nature of the meetings will hold, however, remains in question.

Liao Qun, chief economist at China CITIC Bank International, said that the size of the deal shows trade takes priority above all else.

“Though the U.S. and China do not see eye to eye, both still compete on many geo-political issues, trade still remains at the top of their agenda. With closer trade relations, the U.S.-China relation will still make headway,” Liao said.

​No guarantees

But not all agree with that assessment.

Some analysts said that despite Trump’s softer approach and “incredibly warm” feeling he expressed about his Chinese counterpart, the president is likely to be back to criticizing China again in a few months.

“The president likes deals, and he likes big numbers, but we’re not going to change something he doesn’t like, which is the big China trade deficit, without changing Chinese practices,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “China has to have a different approach to trade in the world than it does.”

Scissors said that more than the deficit, it is what is behind the numbers, such as the fact that Chinese state-owned enterprises never go out of business.

“Which means American goods and services can’t ever win in the China market,” he said.

WATCH: Trump Touts Excellent Progress in Beijing During Talks with Xi

Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy said we may have a case of misaligned assessments of how the visit has played out.

The Chinese leadership may think that they have done a lot to give President Trump face, with all of the pomp and business deals, and that that has put the relationship on solid footing, he said.

“But President Trump may go home to a domestic political environment where people are disappointed he hasn’t achieved more progress on the structural trade and economics issues (market access, more fair and reciprocal treatment for U.S. businesses, intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and Chinese unfair industrial policies) and North Korea,” Haenle said. “My concern is you may see a shift towards a much harder line coming from the U.S. administration. That will be a huge surprise to China and President Xi.”

​Pretty small

The huge deals reached could create jobs in America and provide a small boost to exports, but the meetings did little to advance market access.

“Open markets are better for both sides. It is also better for China to open up its market. But China is not interested in opening markets,” said Christopher Balding, associate professor of finance at Peking University’s HSBC Business.

In a briefing with reporters Thursday after the two leaders issued a joint statement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that “in the grand scheme of a $300- to $500-billion trade deficit, the things that have been achieved thus far are pretty small.”

“I mean, they’re not small if you’re a company, maybe, that has seen some relief. But in terms of really getting at some of the fundamental elements behind why this imbalance exists, there’s still a lot more work to do,” he said.

China has repeatedly pledged to do more to open its markets, and the Communist Party recently approved amendments to its charter that called for letting “the market play a decisive role in the economy. But progress has been slow and contradictory.

Earlier this year, China announced it would be allowing U.S. credit card companies to operate fully owned units in the country after years of stalling. However, several sources recently told Reuters that authorities are still pressing foreign credit card companies to form joint ventures with Chinese companies.

On Friday, China announced that it will raise the ownership limits in joint venture firms involved in securities, futures and fund markets. China’s Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said that ownership limits would be raised from 49 to 51 percent, allowing foreign companies to hold a majority stake.

No time frame for implementing the measures was given, but according to Reuters Zhu did say that all restrictions on equity holdings for the sectors would be removed in three years.

Analysts note that while it is still hard to say what else was discussed behind closed doors, on trade and North Korea, the ball is clearly in China’s court.

“Trump has put the onus on President Xi to solve the North Korea problem. This is why he said that if Xi wants something to happen, it will happen,” Balding said.

VOA’s Joyce Huang and Saibal Dasgupta contributed to this report.
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Donald Trump warned that the stock market was a “big, fat, ugly bubble” just weeks before he was elected. A year later, Wall Street remains on a milestone-shattering run that the president has been eager to tout and tweet about.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the broadest measure of the stock market, has notched 61 record highs and climbed about 21.3 percent in the year since Trump was elected.

That exceeds the S&P 500’s gain in the first-term election anniversaries of all but two presidents since World War II: George H.W. Bush (22.9 percent) and John F. Kennedy (27 percent), according to CFRA Research.

It also outpaces the market’s performance in the same postelection period of several other modern-era White House occupants, including Ronald Reagan (-3.3 percent), Bill Clinton (10.3 percent), George W. Bush (-22.1 percent) and Barack Obama (4.1 percent). But it trails the S&P 500’s gain in the first year after the second-term elections of Clinton (31.7 percent) and Obama (23.4 percent).

​Initially a sell-off in Asia

The billionaire’s surprise electoral victory initially set off a steep sell-off in Asian markets. But by the end of the day on Nov. 9, 2016, global markets had steadied and the S&P 500 index closed sharply higher. The market’s rally continued for several weeks, driving the major U.S. stock indexes to record highs. This year, stocks have gradually moved higher, clocking new milestones for the indexes along the way.

Since Trump’s election, investors have been betting that the White House and a GOP-controlled Congress will have a clear pathway to cut taxes, relax regulations and enact other business-friendly policies, despite legislative stumbles that have delayed the administration’s efforts.

Strong corporate profits, revenue

Yet, the biggest driver of the market’s gains has been strong corporate profits, Wall Street analysts say.

“The most important thing that’s happened is we’ve had very good earnings seasons,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. “Companies are making money. Earnings drive the market and earnings have been good.”

In recent weeks, more than 400 of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their results for the July-through-September quarter, and they’ve been so much better than forecast that Wall Street has more than doubled its expectations for third-quarter earnings growth to 6.8 percent, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

What’s more encouraging to many investors is that more companies than usual are also reporting higher revenue than analysts had forecast.

Stock prices tend to track corporate profits over the long term, so the better-than-expected earnings growth helps to validate the stock market’s record-setting run, at least somewhat.

Betting on growth

Investors have also continued to bet big on economic growth in the U.S. and worldwide as economies in Europe and Asia have bounced back, Kinahan noted.

Since Trump’s election, technology companies have led the way with a 39 percent surge. Banks and industrial and basic materials companies have also soared. Only phone company stocks are down from a year ago.

During the first presidential debate between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in September 2016, Trump cautioned that the stock market was in bubble and that even a small increase in interest rates would bring the market “crashing down.”

That’s not happened, even though the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates twice this year and is expected to do so again next month.

‘Sailing along’ another year

Eight years into the bull market, many analysts expect stocks to keep climbing, at least for the next year. The global economy is improving, corporate profits are rising and inflation remains low but not so low that it makes economists nervous.

On average, the S&P 500 has continued “sailing along” for another year after a president’s first-term election anniversary, before declining 10 percent or more, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

He notes that the shortest time was 36 days following Kennedy’s first election anniversary, while the longest stretch was nearly four years after Clinton was elected.

“Should history repeat, and there is no guarantee it will, this bull (market) could continue to surprise investors with its resiliency,” Stovall said.
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Bicycle highways, urban farms and local energy hubs — just some of the ways that yesterday’s smokestack cities are turning into tomorrow’s green spaces.

The Urban Transitions Alliance (UTA), a network that brings together cities in Germany, the United States and China, launched this week to help members learn regeneration tricks from each other.

“What to do with your brownfield sites, how to transition with citizens in mind, create new jobs — these cities have a lot of challenges in common,” said Roman Mendle, Smart Cities program manager at ICLEI, an international association of local governments.

As up to 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated in urban areas, cities have to play a leading role in addressing climate change.

Experts from more than 20 countries met in Essen, Germany, this week to launch the UTA and thrash out how post-industrial cities can reinvent themselves in plans that will be submitted to the U.N. climate talks in Bonn this week.

Essen, once a coal and steel city known as Germany’s “Graue Maus” (grey mouse) for its polluted air and waterways, has gained a reputation as a trailblazer for sustainability, becoming the European Commission’s European Green Capital 2017.

“There is a lot of know-how in Essen on how to transition from the age of carbon to a post-carbon world,” said Simone Raskob, Essen’s deputy mayor and head of its environment department.

“No city can do this by itself. There are a lot of challenges,” Raskob, who leads the European Green City – Essen 2017 project, told Reuters.

Experts praise Essen for cleaning up its waterways, creating green spaces and turning grimy industrial sites into dynamic cultural centers, such as the Zeche Zollverein, a towering UNESCO World Heritage site that arose from a disused coal mine.

To ease traffic congestion, Essen built Germany’s first bike highway, connecting with a 100-km (62-mile) regional network.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, once a dynamo of U.S. heavy industry, has shifted from a fossil fuel-based economy, reinventing itself as a hub for green buildings innovation and clean energy.

The former steel city has been switching over to LED street lights, retro-fitting municipal buildings for energy efficiency and developing district energy initiatives.

The city will also host the largest U.S. urban farm: 23 acres (9 hectares) on a site where low-income housing once stood.

“One of the key things we have recognized is that becoming greener also brings economic benefits,” said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer.

Founding UTA members include districts of Beijing and Shijiazhuang in China; Buffalo and Cincinnati in the United States; and Dortmund in Germany.
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What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest takeaway as he wraps up a year of travel to dozens of U.S. states? The importance of local communities.

To this end, Facebook’s CEO is announcing a program to boost small businesses and give people technical skills on and off Facebook. The move shows how intertwined Facebook has become not just in our social lives, but in entrepreneurs’ economic survival and growth. Facebook says 70 million small businesses use its service. Only 6 million of them advertise.

Called Community Boost, the program will visit 30 U.S. cities next year and work with local groups to train people in skills such as coding, building websites – and naturally, using Facebook for their business.

Zuckerberg says the effort is not just about Facebook’s business but its core mission.

 
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West Virginia officials announced an agreement on Thursday with China Energy Investment Corp. Ltd. for the company to invest $83.7 billion in shale gas development and chemical manufacturing in West Virginia over 20 years.

State Commerce Secretary Woody Thrasher and China Energy President Ling Wen signed the memorandum in Beijing as part of the U.S.-China trade mission and an overall $250 billion of planned Chinese investments in the U.S. It during President Trump’s visit to Beijing.

West Virginia commerce officials said project planning is already underway and will focus on power generation, chemical manufacturing and underground storage of natural gas liquids and derivatives. The state was chosen for its position as an energy producer and its large underground shale gas reserves.

“West Virginia has actively sought direct foreign investment to strengthen and diversify our economy,” Thrasher said. Toyota, Hino Motors, Gestamp, Sogefi and other corporations with international parent companies have created jobs and generated income in the state, and they expect China Energy to bring mutual benefits, he said.

West Virginia University since 2002 has been jointly researching coal liquefaction with mining company Shenhua Group, which merged with energy company Guodian Group to form China Energy.

The university said it will work closely with state officials to help coordinate the investment,with funding focused on developing the proposed Appalachia storage and trading hub.

In August, the university released a study by researchers from the geological surveys in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio of geologic formations that could be used by developers to build underground facilities to store natural gas liquids from natural gas wells.

Last year, the university and Shenhua signed a partnership agreement to establish West Virginia as the priority area the company’s U.S. investments, natural gas power plant development, shale gas development and upstream and downstream businesses, technologies in clean coal and power and training.

Brian Anderson, director of WVU’s Energy Institute, called Thursday’s memorandum “a game changer for the state.”

The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and other environmental groups oppose the storage hub, saying it would create a major petrochemical region with public health dangers and contribute to global warming.

 
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The “Paradise Papers,” millions of confidential documents on offshore investments that were leaked this week, have shed light on the financial affairs of world leaders such as Queen Elizabeth II and the president of Colombia. They also cite several prominent politicians in the world’s fourth largest country, Indonesia, including children of its famously corrupt late dictator Suharto, who skimmed over $30 billion in his lifetime.

The documents cite Suharto’s daughter Mamiek and son Tommy, a playboy businessman and convicted murderer; Sandiaga Uno, an entrepreneur and the current deputy of Jakarta; and Prabowo Subianto, a businessman, former army general, and current opposition coalition leader who narrowly lost the 2014 presidential election.

“We found 215 Indonesian names in total,” said Wahyu Dhyatmika, who was the only Indonesian member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) team that shared the documents. He said the remaining names — 200 individuals and 15 companies — would become public as the complete documents are shared in coming weeks. The Indonesian names that have been released so far are only a small, albeit prominent, sample.

The documents are drawn from the offshore law firm Appleby in Bermuda, corporate services providers Estera and Asiaciti Trust, and business registries in 19 tax havens worldwide. They list over 120,000 names of people engaged in offshore investments.

Prominent names

According to the documents, Prabowo was director of a company called Nusantara Energy Resources that opened in Bermuda in 2001 and closed in 2004. Tommy Suharto was director of a company registered in Bermuda called Asia Market Investment, which opened in 1997 and closed in 2000.

Sandiaga, whose name also came up in last year’s Panama Papers leak in relation to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, was shown to have worked with a Canadian oil and gas exploration company called NTI Resources.

It is difficult to penalize the offshoring of assets as it is rarely illegal. But in Indonesia, the revelations have come during a year of aggressive crackdowns on tax evasion from the Finance Ministry.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani told reporters this week that she would examine the records of everyone named in the Paradise Papers, although a spokesperson for the ministry said they could not comment on their findings until the remaining 215 Indonesian names have surfaced.

Tommy Suharto showily declared over $910 million last year in the minister’s flagship tax amnesty program to recover overseas assets, more than doubling the revenue at that point.

“As a journalist, I just want people to know how the world works,” said Drew Sullivan, one of the leaders of the ICIJ effort. “Countries like Russia, China. Brazil and Indonesia have too much of their economies, their industries, their wealth and assets moving through opaque structures that hide corruption and wealth. That is not good. You can’t do business in the dark because it’s dangerous and helps corruption thrive.”

“We will try to obtain more comprehensive and detailed data on the individuals named in the Papers as part of efforts to ensure taxpayer compliance,” said Hestu Yoga Saksama, spokesman for the Directorate General of Taxation.

“We’re not shocked by the names that have surfaced,” said Firdaus Ilyas of Indonesia Corruption Watch. “Particularly for the Suhartos — there have historically been very few consequences for that family.” “And Prabowo and Sandi are prominent figures, but they usually campaign on identity politics,” he said, so corruption allegations are unlikely to seriously impact their image or electability.

The challenge of accountability

The offshoring implied by the Paradise Papers is “very typical” of Indonesian business, said Wayne Forrest, who leads the American Indonesian Chamber of Commerce. “The companies registered probably were established in the 1990s… keeping money offshore is standard practice when your currency can devalue,” as it did during the Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto.

“Frankly we’re not sure the Directorate General of Taxes is brave enough to investigate the Paradise Papers further; we still haven’t even heard any follow-up to the Panama Papers,” said Firdaus. “[Finance Minister] Sri Mulyani is the best hope for now.”

But there are high costs to investigating the claims: Tommy Suharto once plotted the murder of a judge who served him a corruption charge in 2000; Prabowo organized the kidnappings of pro-democracy activists in 1997 and 1998.

“There is low incentive for Indonesian journalists to follow up on these figures, even though it is the crucial next step” said Andreas Harsono, a former journalist and current researcher with Human Rights Watch in Jakarta. “We need to connect the companies cited in the Papers with the acts they did within Indonesia. Otherwise they are just names.”

Harsono cited the example of Goerge Aditjondro, a journalist who made it his mission  to surface the details of Suharto family wealth in the late 1990’s.

“It was a lonely quest, and he died with hardly a penny to his name,” said Harsono. “The fact that he did it is amazing. But working on asset recovery in Indonesia is usually a thankless task.”

 
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The European Commission said Wednesday it wants to cut emissions of carbon dioxide from cars by 30 percent by 2030 and boost the use of electric vehicles by making them cheaper and easier to charge.

The proposal stops short of imposing fixed quotas for emission-free vehicles and is more modest than goals already set out by some EU members. Still, European automakers said the commission’s targets were too drastic, and Germany’s foreign minister warned against the proposal.

Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic insisted that the plan is the most “realistic” compromise between Europe’s ambitions to blaze trails on clean energy and the costs that the continent’s powerful car manufacturers will have to bear to overhaul workforces and production.

Current targets require automakers to achieve the average permitted emission for new models in the European Union of 95 grams of CO2 per kilometer for cars, or 147 grams for light commercial vehicles by 2021.

The new proposal foresees a further reduction of 15 percent by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030, compared to 2021 levels.

Car companies that fail to meet those targets face substantial fines of 95 euros ($110) per excess gram of carbon dioxide – per car. Automakers that manage to equip at least 30 percent of their new cars with electric or other low-emission engines by 2030 will be given credits toward their carbon tally.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, an industry body, criticized the 2025 target, saying “it does not leave enough time to make the necessary technical and design changes to vehicles, in particular to light commercial vehicles given their longer development and production cycles.”

The lobby group also said the targeted cut of 30 percent by 2030 was “overly challenging” and called for a 20 percent reduction instead, saying that was “achievable at a high, but acceptable, cost.”

“The current proposal is very aggressive when we consider the low and fragmented market penetration of alternatively-powered vehicles across Europe to date,” the group’s secretary general, Erik Jonnaert, said.

Germany’s foreign minister wrote to the commission last week to say the new rules shouldn’t “suffocate” the ability of automakers to innovate.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said all European countries benefit from the jobs the auto industry creates and warned that the time frame for emissions cuts “mustn’t be too restrictive.”

The letter caused friction within the German government, which is currently hosting a two-week United Nations meeting on implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord.

“The contents of this letter weren’t coordinated within the Cabinet,” a spokeswoman for Germany’s environment ministry, Friederike Langenbruch, told reporters in Berlin.

Germany is predicted to fall short of its own climate goals, in large part due to continued high emissions from coal-fired electricity plants and vehicle traffic.

The European executive’s plan also includes 800 million euros in funding for the expansion and standardization of electric charging stations Europe-wide.

 
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Emerging nations pressed developed countries Wednesday to step up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to kick-start the Paris climate agreement, saying the rich were wrongly focused on 2030 goals.

“We came here needing to hit the accelerator, not the brakes,” Brazil’s chief negotiator Antonio Marcondes told Reuters on the sidelines of the November 6-17 negotiations in Germany on limiting global warming.

In 2015, almost 200 governments agreed on the Paris accord to end the fossil fuel era by 2100 and remained united last year in declaring action “irreversible” after Donald Trump, who has called man-made climate change a hoax, won the U.S. presidential election.

But that unity is fraying.

Under the Paris Agreement, most governments set targets for cutting emissions by 2030, with little focus on shorter-term milestones.

Brazil and nations including India, China and Iran now want to fill the gap with more action by 2020 to cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially by the rich, which have burned the most fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

“While action on [the] post-2020 period under the Paris Agreement has gained momentum, the discussions on pre-2020 actions have lagged behind,” India’s chief negotiator Ravi S. Prasad said this week.

Actions defended

Developed nations say they are acting. European Union officials pointed to proposals on Wednesday for tougher car emissions targets, including a credit system for carmakers to encourage the rollout of electric vehicles.

Nazhat Shameem Khan, chief negotiator for Fiji, which is presiding at the meeting, said: “Clearly, there is strong appetite for a constructive and focused discussion on pre-2020.

“I think it’s a generalized view … that there hasn’t been enough discussion” about what to do before 2020, she said.

Overall, she said, the talks, also working on a detailed rule book for the Paris Agreement, were advancing well and that the United States delegation was being “constructive and helpful.”

Trump said in June that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a process that will take effect in 2020, and instead promote coal and oil.

A pullout will isolate the United States since Syria, the only other nation outside the pact, said Tuesday that it would join.

Under the Paris Agreement, the period to 2020 is a gap partly because backers of the 2015 pact assumed it might take years for parliaments to ratify it. The deal entered into force in record time last November.

Camilla Born, of the E3G think tank, said the Paris Agreement was now a victim of its own success. “It’s right now to shine the spotlight on more action by 2020,” she said.
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An independent analysis has concluded the U.S. tax overhaul being advanced by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives would add $1.7 trillion to the country’s debt during the next decade, about $259 billion more than previously assumed.

The Congressional Budget Office analysis was released Wednesday as lawmakers continue to consider an array of proposals aimed at cutting the country’s corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent and trimming tax rates for many, but not all, middle-class families, broadly defined in the United States as those with an annual household income of $49,000 to $86,000.

The new analysis from the agency that is considered to be the independent scorekeeper for congressional financial policies could complicate Republican plans for the House to adopt the tax overhaul before the country’s Thanksgiving holiday on November 23.

Republican lawmakers had pledged the tax cuts over the next decade would not add any more than $1.5 trillion to the country’s current and growing long-term debt of more than $20 trillion.

With the CBO’s estimate the tax changes would cost more, the majority Republicans in the House would have to change their proposals to keep the additional costs within the $1.5 trillion limit they have imposed on themselves.

The tax overhaul could be the country’s first substantial changes to its labyrinth tax code in more than three decades. Senate Republicans are expected to unveil their tax change proposals on Thursday, which are likely to be widely different than the House proposals.

President Donald Trump has called for the tax overhaul, but both chambers of Congress would have to approve identical pieces of tax legislation before he could sign the measure.
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