Biden and his team feel they have been vindicated by the same principles in years to come

First Face-to-Face Exchange between the U.S. and China after the Pelosi Visit to Taiwan: An Outlook for the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia

Since then ties between the US and China have soured due to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. That helps explain the low expectations for the meeting between Biden and Chinese leader on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

The leaders of two superpowers met face-to-face and unmasked on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday evening. In a substantial meeting, they touched on the war in Ukraine, military tension in the Taiwan Strait and North Korean missile tests.

“Do I believe he’s willing to compromise on certain issues? Yes,” Biden told reporters afterward about his meeting with Xi. “We were very blunt with one another about places where we disagreed.”

Today’s meeting was the first face-to-face exchange between the two since Biden became president. Analysts say that it happened after both of them strengthened their political positions at home.

The senior research fellow on China at Chatham House says that he is in a better position to steer the relationship between Washington and Beijing due to Biden’s success.

U.S. officials share the same optimism. The Chinese system has been created in part by the fact that leaders are meeting, according to a senior administration official.

Both Beijing and Washington said they would resume the climate talks that were frozen after Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. The White House said the leaders agreed to allow senior officials to maintain communication and deepen efforts.

However, Yu warns that Monday’s meeting is just “a baby step” towards improving relations: “It will not resolve any substantial grievances both sides have had against each other, but only slowing down the deterioration of their relations.”

The “Taiwan question” is an internal matter, and China will “never again” say, in reference to the visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken

The State Department said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also visit China in person sometime early next year to follow up on the Xi-Biden meeting.

Beijing does not believe that the U.S. has done the right thing on all counts. It has imposed the semiconductor export bans and sanctioned some of China’s leading technology firms — moves Beijing decried.

Biden said that he didn’t think there would be an attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan.

The world is big enough for the two countries to prosper together, as was said by a foreign ministry spokesman in the meeting with Biden.

China regards the “Taiwan question” an internal matter. It is “at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations,” wrote Hua, the spokesperson, on Twitter after the meeting ended.

China is watching closely, too. The appointment of a new slate of military leaders from China’s Eastern Theater Command indicates that Taiwan is one of the priorities for China’s fighting forces. Last week, he urged his military to “focus all its energy on fighting.”

Some analysts say China appeared to be blindsided when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Beijing has called repeatedly for a peaceful, negotiated end to the war.

The countries should not fight, said a statement from the leader. Both sides would continue discussions on the basis of common understandings already in place and “strive for early agreement,” he added.

In order to improve relations, Wang Yi demanded the U.S. to respect China’s claims and not get in the way of the country’s development.

Hong Kong – China Stock Markets Rise and Fall: How the U.S. and China are trying to Make Sense of each Other

While Biden got a better position at the G20 due to the Senate’s victory, he is up for reelection in two years.

The meeting could lay the groundwork for a stronger relationship between the world’s top economies. The stock markets in Hong Kong and mainland China rose on Tuesday, thanks to a surge in technology giants.

Neil Thomas, senior analyst for China and Northeast Asia at Eurasia Group, said the goal of the meeting was to “build a floor” under declining relations between Beijing and Washington.

Climate change, debt relief, health security and global food security are just a few of the challenges the United States and China need to address together.

Ken Cheung, chief Asian foreign exchange strategist at Mizuho Bank, said the meeting was a positive sign that the two sides were keen to find common ground.

In recent months, tensions between the United States and China have increased as the countries compete for dominance of the microchip industry and argue over tariffs, US support for Taiwan and potential spy balloons.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng

            (HSI) Index rallied nearly 4% on Tuesday, on track to record a third straight day of gains. The index, boosted by China’s latest policy shift towards a gradual reopening of borders and a sweeping rescue package for the ailing property sector, has soared 14% since last Thursday.

Chinese technology shares, which had been hammered by a regulatory crackdown at home and rising geopolitical tension abroad, led markets higher on Tuesday. Alibaba shares shot up by 11% in Hong Kong, followed by Tencent, which was up 10%.

The G20 Agenda of the First Underlying US President, Xi Jinping, during the January 6, United States Presidential Resummation

They said Biden’s reiteration of the US position on Taiwan was beneficial, along with the fact that Xi was speaking out against the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

It was far more progress than we or most commentators had expected, and dominates what may otherwise turn out to be a fairly unimportant G20 summit, said analysts from ING.

The President spent hours trying to convince a group of US friends that America was back during his first foreign trip. He told advisers how much more work needed to be done to convince them of the lasting nature of that commitment.

Biden pushed for policies that would address short term incentives that had driven jobs out and wages down, as he took the role of a middle class luminary. Those speeches and discussions served as a roadmap of sorts for an agenda that is now largely law. They detailed major infrastructure investments and a incentivizing research and development that had atrophied. There were broad outlines of nascent ideas to connect hollowed out manufacturing centers and communities to new opportunities. Biden proposed changes to the tax code that tracked near where his administration would eventually land as it sought to finance spending plans.

During those meetings in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of allies shaken by the events that happened on January 6. The president tried to assure them that the violence that day would heal and that the moment of despair in US politics would pass.

Biden said it was important to succeed in his agenda, regardless of whether it was dealing with the vaccine, the economy, or infrastructure. We need to show we can make progress and keep making progress. I believe we will be able to do that.

It is a poetic coda for Biden to have his final major action before the end of the year. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he will sign will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.

Biden has a steady approach that is underpinned by the fact that he does something if he says so, according to one of his closest advisers.

Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.

Biden’s closest confidants also stress that it’s a perspective that is instructive as the White House prepares for the dramatically reshaped Washington that will confront him upon his return from his family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.

A Biden adviser says the idea of showing people government can work was mocked in some corners. That is what is happening right now.

There are still a lot of challenges ahead. Inflation remains high even if its grip appears to be easing. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.

Biden’s approval ratings are low and he is old, which is concern for Democrats as they wait for an official decision on whether he will seek reelection.

But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.

It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team is more confident that the reelection campaign will be ready in the weeks ahead.

The political salience of his agenda is seen by White House officials as anunderappreciated aspect of their ability to defy expectations of the GOP in the upcoming elections. The implementation phase of an agenda that has been in the works for some time is unaffected by the prospect of divided government and the very small legislative pathway it brings.

“It forms the foundation for even stronger achievements as the nation heads into the New Year,” Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle, wrote in a political memo circulated to allies this month.

Advisers said Biden laid down strict instructions to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation.

A senior administration official said that the message from the top was not subtle. “We have to get it right and in the moments we don’t, we damn well be ready to explain it – and fix it.”

“A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.

Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals, but none of which included a realistic way to pass a bitterly divided Congress, as Vice President Joe Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal as a central policy plank of his campaign.

What the proposals – particularly across industries and policy priorities tied to climate and manufacturing – also represented was a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not monolithic, economic orthodoxy. Biden was in charge of the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He would do it with Republican support.

Biden’s Foundation for a Coherent Policy Agenda in the 2020 Presidential Campaign: A Memo Memo from Ricchetti and his Father, Fred Biden

He thought the right time was for his theory of the case. “He could apply the principles that have really guided him throughout his whole career.”

Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.

“Ever since I’ve talked to the president about the economy, he’s distinguished between the short-term and the long-term, between consumption and investment,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economist as vice president who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers. These have always been in his economic thinking.

The 2020 campaign was built on the same principles and themes that were outlined in a 22-page memo Biden wrote before jumping into the 2016 race.

The same anecdotes, his father’s saying about the dignity of work, and the American willingness to do anything make up his speeches as president.

Ricchetti, who as counselor to the president helped lead the White House legislative effort, pointed to a clear “through-line” from Biden’s days as a senator, through his time as vice president and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

Biden wrote a book about how he dealt with the pain of not running for president as he dealt with his son’s fight with brain cancer. That process and the book tour that followed are viewed by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in the eventual decision to run in 2020.

If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.

If the proposals were scaled back, officials structured theinfrastructure,manufacturing, research and development,climate and equity proposals into interlocking pieces to work in tandem.

“At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.

It is clear that adhering to the termindustrial policy isn’t universally embraced. Even Deese, who has driven and defined its core elements, prefers “Modern American Industrial Strategy.” In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.

A resurgence in research and development funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. Labor unions and a focus on creating conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US are two things that have been elevated.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/politics/joe-biden-2022/index.html

Todd Biden, the Rise of China, and the Challenges of the 21st Century: The Case for Changing the Face of the American Economy

On their face, these issues are politically popular and hardly exclusive to Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.

The bipartisan zeal behind the CHIPS and Science law was due to the fact that semiconductors are the essential parts of everything from cars to advanced weapons systems. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.

For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer. Young was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted to advance the eventual law that has driven new private sector investment or commitments in the last several months.

The pandemic. The rise of China is part of policy making in both parties. A president is talking about long-term economic incentives that connect workers and communities left behind.

Kaufman is an old friend of the president and is Biden’s Senate chief of staff. This guy is well qualified to be president because of his experience.

In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Advisers don’t consider it a question of if Biden would win. The man wouldn’t have had a chance to run.

The voters overwhelmingly reject the most extreme voices in the 2020 election for governor and secretary of state, which is critically important for Biden.

During the months leading up to the election, Biden had begun to recount his experience in foreign countries in order to emphasize the stakes.

In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.

The United States is in a better place to lead the world economy in the years ahead if we keep our focus, according to Biden.

“The thing I worry the most about is Ukraine,” he told Bloomberg Television in an interview Monday morning. “It’s oil, gas, the leadership of the world, and our relationship with China — that is much more serious than the economic vibrations that we all have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia over a year ago has wreaked havoc on the global economy, leading to a rise in food and energy prices, along with supply chain disruptions and interest rate hikes from the world’s central banks.

This is the most serious conflict that we have had since World War II, highlighted by the impact on relations with China.

Beijing enjoys a close relationship with Moscow, and the Chinese government has been purchasing Russian energy and supplying machinery, electronics, base metals, vehicles, ships and aircraft, throwing the Kremlin an economic lifeline.

Dimon said JPMorgan Chase is taking an active role in improving the relationship between the United States and China by advising and engaging with both governments on keeping cordial relations. He’s hoping that “cooler heads prevail” but he doesn’t believe a business solution exists to ease growing disputes. While JPMorgan Chase does a fair share of business with Beijing, it’s the government, not private enterprise, that has to smooth tensions, he said.

“We probably should have started resetting this 10 years ago,” he said. The US government has to sit down and have a “very serious conversation with the Chinese government,” he said.

Is America going to a recession? What Do We Know about the Consumer in the Light of Dimon’s Hopes and Prospects?

He is still holding out hope that the Federal Reserve will be able to execute a soft landing and avoid a recession. But overall, his outlook remains cloudy.

Dimon did note that the US consumer is still very healthy: Home prices and wages are high, households still have more money in their bank accounts than they did before the pandemic and they’re still spending it.

Still, even if America does enter a recession, he said, consumers are much stronger and will be able to better withstand a downturn than they were in 2008.