THE White House last night said Donald Trump was “optimistic” of striking a deal with China.
Yet just hours earlier, Beijing had mocked his tariff tactics as a “joke”.
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The tit-for-tat trade war saw China hike the levies on US goods from 84 per cent to 125 per cent yesterday as it hit back at the US President’s rates of 145 per cent on Chinese goods.
President Xi Jinping branded Trump’s tactics “unilateral acts of bullying”.
A spokesman for China’s commerce ministry said the US tariff policy would “go down as a joke in the history of world economics”.
He added that the bit-by-bit rises had “become nothing more than a numbers game” and it would shrug off any further increases as US goods would already be unmarketable for Chinese consumers.
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White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt yesterday said that the President was open to a deal with China.
She claimed that he “negotiates a deal better than anyone else who has sat before him”.
Ms Leavitt said the “phone has been ringing off the hook” from 75 countries looking to cut trade deals and already had 15 offers on the table.
The update came on another volatile day for global markets, with stocks climbing higher after a roller-coaster ride which saw trillions lost and gained.
US government bonds suffered their worst day in six years in a stark warning about investors’ confidence in Trump’s policies.