Videos of triumphant doctors in Wuhan removing their protective equipment flooding social media this week symbolized the end of the fight against COVID-19 in the city where the outbreak began. With travel restrictions set to lift April 8 in Wuhan and wider Hubei province, and domestically transmitted cases of the virus near zero, life for China’s 1.4 billion residents is getting back to a new normal.

It took COVID-19 several weeks to mass migrate from China to Europe, but the continent is now awash in the virus. The pandemic has fully arrived in Italy and Spain. Other nations await the disease, hoping to slow its spread. It will kill many Europeans. It also might kill the European Union, at least the idea of a European community in any meaningful sense.

President Trump’s intention to persuade China to play by long-established international trade rules is commendable. But focusing on the U.S. trade deficit with China, and imposing tariffs to eliminate it, has proven ineffective. Now, the coronavirus has given Trump an opportunity to shelve that failed strategy and immediately eliminate tariffs on Chinese imports. This shot in the arm will likely be reciprocated by China, stimulate our economies, and give Trump the opportunity to chart a better course. Let me explain.

After some fits and starts, Joe Biden has emerged from a crowded field as the front‐runner for the Democratic nomination. There’s still some politicking left to go, but let’s talk about what a Biden trade policy might look like if he is elected president. In this article, I’ll consider three things: (1) What Biden has said about trade during the Democratic primary campaign; (2) what the Obama administration did on trade when Biden was vice‐president; and (3) what issues Biden would face and what he might do as president (this section is very speculative!).

The Covid 19 outbreak set the field, but the direct cause of oil’s crash last week reads from an old playbook. WTI has been on a freefall losing over $16 in two days, prompting a wider stock market sell off that created another Black Monday as the Dow dove 7% in a single day. The day saw trading halted for a 15 minute period in an effort to stop the bleeding, but once it resumed, so did the panic. All indicators suggest it will get worse.

It was quite some time ago that we began to speculate about the role 3D printing might play in our modern society. As the technology really started to emerge around the middle of the last decade, we previewed the potential impact on American manufacturing and highlighted broad ideas, such as reduced costs and greater design security.

I’ve spent several weeks confined to my apartment building in Jinan, a few hours south of Beijing, where I work as an English teacher. I’ve dared to venture out only twice: to the grocery store, where a masked employee checked my temperature upon entrance, despite ominous warnings from coworkers to avoid stores as possible sites of coronavirus transmission. Other than that, I sit in my studio apartment, keeping busy with books, Netflix, and of course, pouring over the latest facts and figures on the epidemic on WeChat.

The Maoist totalitarian state is being reborn in China under Xi Jinping, who is constructing a personality cult akin to that which surrounded the late “Great Helmsman.” Xi is determined to strengthen his and the Chinese Communist Party’s authority. However, the response of the Chinese government to the COVID-19 virus has undermined the CCP’s credibility—and ultimately may threaten the party’s hold on power.

In his recent State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump touted the strong US economy and low unemployment rate, claiming credit for a “great American comeback” driven in significant part by his trade policies. The president was right about the general health of the US economy, but not about the role of his trade policies.

The recent U.S. Treasury’s semi-annual report on the exchange rate policies of China and other major trading partners is an exercise in intellectual gymnastics. The report reiterates that China was indeed a currency manipulator, as Treasury declared in August 2019, but then stated it has magically ceased to be one just prior to the two nations signing the “Phase One” trade deal in Washington.