They are, and the Chinese are trying to backfill the narrative, saying, well, the US did A.B. and C, therefore. But we had to do D. And that's not true. There was a new video. The lower level trade person who was slightly unhinged here. in August I think his name is Lee Kwon-dong and threatening saying that China would unleash chaos on the global system if the US went ahead with docking fees for Chinese ships. This is clearly something that they were planning all along. I think that things can deescalate, that we don't want to have to escalate. We have things that are more powerful than the rare earth export controls that the Chinese want to put on. And so to be clear, this is China versus the world. It's not a US-China problem. Good news is that this is IMF week a lot of my counterparts are here. We're going to be speaking with our European allies, with Australia, with Canada, with India, and the Asian democracies. And we're going to have a fulsome group response to this because bureaucrats in China cannot manage the supply chain or the manufacturing process for the rest of the world.

We have lots of levers that we can pull for products that they need that could be equally damaging. We don't want to damage their economy. We don't believe that they want to damage ours. But they are a command and control economy and they are going to neither command nor control us. And we're going to assert sovereignty so are the Western allies. And part of this investment boom that we're seeing is President Trump wanted to reshore. And part of the reshore is strategic. So we don't want to decouple with China. I don't believe they want to decouple. But this rare earth export control is a sign of decoupling.

We do. We have lots of leverage on them too. We unfortunately have semiconductors, aircraft engines, many minerals important for their supply system. What we learned during COVID was a test run for what we're seeing now in terms of bringing back strategic industries. We have a big investment boom and about 10-20% of it is bringing back five to seven strategic industries that we need, pharma, semiconductors, shipbuilding, steel, rare earths. This rare earths problem was decades in the making. Previous administrations should be ashamed. President Trump tried to solve it in his last term but environmentalists objected. But again, I'm optimistic. We're now communicating at very high levels.

There have been many outreaches. China has large delegations everywhere including IMF World Bank Week. We're holding working level meetings.

As far as I know, yes. I think they have an excellent relationship and the reason this didn't really escalate is the level of trust between the two leaders. That's an enduring part of US-China and everything else stems from that.

Yeah, the narrative is terrible. Some claim President Trump takes CCP dictation. President Trump likes a high stock market, but he and I believe that the high stock market is the result of good policies. The policies we talk about today related to this capex boom. The stock market is a result. If we have to take strong measures against China, so be it. The stock market won't dictate our decisions. We will negotiate because we are doing what's best economically for the U.S.