Marketplace - The state of U.S.-China trade

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

President Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, and AI safety is likely to define the agenda. But what about those pesky tariffs? In this episode, we lay out the fraught trade relationship between the U.S. and China. Plus: Airlines trim their flight schedules to combat high fuel prices, the price of copper may tell us less about global economic growth than it used to, and Ohio cities court recent grads looking for job opportunities and affordability.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.Read the stories in today’s episode:Trade tensions between U.S. and China simmer ahead of Trump-Xi summitIs "Dr. Copper" becoming less reliable?Starting a new career? Start in Ohio, report saysAirlines are trimming routes as fuel prices soarSorry brunch, but you're old news

Oh, look, trade and tariffs back in the news from American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal Monday. Today, 21 September, good as it always is to have you along, everybody. We're going to mostly take a pass on the old standbys this week, jobs and inflation and data, and we are turning for our economic throughline instead to foreign affairs. China's president Xi Jinping is headed to Washington this week. Our slice of it, at least to start, is the on again, off again, on again, off again, trade war between the two biggest economies in the world.

And if you have lost track of where things stand, join the club. Marketplace's Justin Ho gets us going with a refresher. It wasn't too long ago that tariffs on Chinese goods were skyrocketing back in the spring of last year. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods reached 145% at their peak. Megan Schoenberger is senior economist with KPMG. She says China was hitting back to reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods reached 125%. But in the time since, tariffs have come down. Ed Gresser with the Progressive Policy Institute says when you average the tariffs that are in place right now.

Most of the things you're buying in a store that are Chinese made will have a, you know, about a 20 to 30 percent tariff, depending on the type of product. Gresser says that's still higher than tariffs were during the Biden administration. But he says it is a sign that the trade war is on hold. It's not like issues are settled. It's more like both sides have been bloodied a bit and they're feeling it in their best interest to not continue that for a while. Imports from China have been picking up this year. Megan Schoenberg with KPMG says that's been fueled by demand for computers, data storage devices, and other components needed to build out AI infrastructure.

It is the main driver of why we see a larger trade deficit in the most recent. recent numbers. And a lot of these products, importantly, are exempted from tariffs. But exports to China have not been very strong. Earlier this year, China said it would buy about 25 million metric tons of American soybeans. But Naomi Bloom, with Total Farm Marketing, says at this point, China has purchased approximately half of that. The Trump administration's also claimed that China will purchase about $17 billion worth of cotton, sorghum, corn, and other ag products. Bloom says that would be a huge. huge relief for American farmers.

When you have over $6 diesel, the farmers are still not making money because they're getting ready to harvest. And some of those combines take 300 to 400 gallons of diesel. But so far, Bloom says China hasn't really shown up. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. 300 gallons of diesel at six bucks a whack, right? Wall Street today, well, my goodness, traders were in quite a good mood. Oil fell.

Stocks went up. Happy Monday. We'll have the details when we do the number. All right, let's talk commodities here for a bit, shall we not oil the commodity most in the news of late, I know, but rather a commodity that arguably can tell us almost as much as crude about the global economy, specifically about the prospects for global growth. Copper. As its price goes up, so too does the outlook for the global economy because copper is used in so many different industries. And copper prices have indeed been going up, 45% this year so far, a record high. earlier this month. But as Marketplaces Henry Ep reports, there are some things going on in the copper market right now. It wasn't that long ago that the price of copper could kind of tell you how

the economy was doing, says Ian Lang at the Colorado School of Mines. And so if you saw sort of uptake in demands for copper, you said, oh, okay, right, we're building more houses, we're building more cars, right? So things must be going well in the economy. And yeah, we do still use copper in cars and houses and appliances, but says Jacob White. at Sprott Asset Management? In the world of 2026, it's really more about the strategic end uses. These days, tons of copper goes into data centers, electricity infrastructure, and defense systems, and because it's being used for strategic industries, the price of copper is a bit less

tied to broader ups and downs in the economy. When electricity grids, for example, or AI data centers or defense programs, are procuring copper, it doesn't necessarily matter to them. that copper is at an all-time high. And there are factors besides demand, keeping that price high. First, there have been a bunch of recent disruptions at copper mines around the world, says Natalie Scott Gray at the financial firm Stone X. We've had earthquakes.

We've had flooding in Indonesia, which really can't be helped. And many of those mines are old, so they're getting more expensive to operate. Then there's tariffs. The Trump administration has been signaling that it might tax imports of refined copper for over a year now. It hasn't done it yet, but companies are still sending tons of copper to the U.S. to get ahead of tariffs. And that has global implications. So we've had this extreme tightening in the market outside of the U.S. And that's really been the primary driver, why we have very high copper prices. All that, Scott Gray says, is diminishing Dr. Copper's

accuracy as an economic forecaster. I'm Henry App for Marketplace. I'm going to preface this next item with a warning that it's a tad weedy, a little bit dense, but it's important, so bear with me. Last week during his press conference, Chairman Kevin Warsh was asked about something called the neutral rate, the neutral rate of interest specifically, and what he thought of it. It's useful academically. It's a discussion to help us think about policy. Do I think it has any operational effect on decisions? that we make today, no, I don't.

Useful academically, but not operationally. We have gotten Courtney Brown from Axios, also one of our Friday regulars. On the phone to talk about that a little bit, to dig in, Tad, Courtney, so good to talk to you, even if it's not on a Friday. Even if it's not on a Friday. Good to talk to you, too. Okay, so we're going to talk about what the chairman said in a second. First, though, in number one, layman's terms and in number two, like in 45 seconds,

what is the neutral rate? Okay, so the neutral rate, I've always thought about it since I've been covering the beat. I've always thought about it as kind of like Bigfoot, right? Like you can see evidence of Bigfoot, but you never see Bigfoot itself. So the neutral rate is this level that is not directly observable where interest rates are neither restraining the economy or gooseing the economy. But again, no one knows where it is in real time. So that's why it's like Bigfoot. But I have to ask, why can't we, is this like Schrodinger's interest rate or what?

Yeah. Exactly. When I first started covering the Fed, I was like, what do you mean they don't know? It is this thing that is very academic. And it seems like Warsh is not very willing to engage in the academic conversation of where the neutral rate is in the way that, I don't know, former Chair Powell was or even New York Fed President John Williams is. one would imagine though that even if you can't directly observe it you can have some sense of it and it would be helpful to know yes it would be helpful to know because if you know where neutral is you know maybe how far to go above it to do things like contain inflation or how far to go below it to do things like you know try to juice the economy as they were trying to do in the 2010s and so not knowing where it is is a problem, which is why it's always confused me that it was this kind of like mythical concept. Okay. So to brass tax here, Worse said the other day in his presser, he says,

I found it difficult to describe the financial conditions as restrictive. Once again, let's do a perimeter here. Financial conditions being restrictive means what? Financial conditions meaning being restrictive means like, look at the stock market. Look at how the stock market is. And if they're restrictive, maybe the stock market wouldn't be as high flying. What are credit conditions doing? Warsh is essentially saying, when I look around and I look at things like the stock market, credit conditions, doesn't seem like it's all that restraining. Doesn't seem like it's restricting activity all that much. And they have removed, quoting the chairman again, I'm doing a lot of that in this interview.

They have removed a dose of accommodation, accommodation being letting things go, I suppose, right? Yeah, and this was a huge moment in the press conference, and I don't know if Warsh intended that to be the case. But by saying we've moved a dose of accommodation, you're implying that rates are accommodative. And up until this point, I think we've heard a lot of Fed officials describe rates as a little bit restrictive. So that raises all kinds of questions of perhaps how much more does the Fed have to raise, rates from here in order to restrain the economy and do things like bring inflation down. Right. I'm sure you saw this morning that Austin Goolsby, the president of the Chicago Fed, said, we try real hard most of the time the Central Bank does, to look through oil shocks.

And he said, you know, maybe the time has come where we can't really do that anymore. So you're all in the Chairman's Press conference last week. What Goolsby said this morning, and I'm sure we're going to get a zillion more Fed speakers this week, certainly it does seem as if more restrictive policy is on the way, yes? Yes. And Gulesby did a little hang with a few reporters after his speech in London. And I was one as he does. He's that kind of guy. I was a part of that hang. And, you know, much of the conversation seemed to boil down to the Fed has a little bit of a problem right now. Because many of the things pushing up inflation don't really seem all that affected by interest rates.

So we got the oil shock as a result of the Middle East conflict. But we also have something like the AI investment boom. And one of the things that President Gulsby said this morning is that he doesn't really see that activity as being particularly interest rate sensitive. Here's why that matters. The Fed has to raise rates almost any way as an attempt to get inflation down. And that might not hit the sources of inflation, but it's going to hit other parts of the economy. So Gulsby was talking about a potentially painful tradeoff. where there are parts of the economy that aren't necessarily the sources of inflation going to be restrained by higher and more restrictive policy.

Since I've got you and we have a little bit of time, I do need to touch now on the whole long and variable lag thing, right? Because it's not like there's switches that get flipped and things happen, right? These changes in interest rate policy get made. And then we just kind of have to see. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And this is my least favorite phrase in monetary policy. long and variable lags. But it's very true, right? The way that interest rates affect the economy is just crazy to me as well. Like kind of a mystery. We don't know when and exactly how interest

rates will affect the economy and it changes from business cycle to business cycle. So it is very much the case that in a few months, the economy will start to feel whatever interest rate increases as the Fed pushes through now, and what will that look like? Well, that's anyone's guess. It is a frustrating, frustrating line of work covering this stuff. It is. Ultimately fun and rewarding. Courtney Brown at Axios, thank you, Courtney.

Thanks, Guy. One might imagine that for those just starting out in the labor market, the coasts are the place to be, big dynamic cities, lots of jobs. You can see the logic, right? Well, think again, the job search site monster says Ohio is the place for somebody to launched their career. Munser ranked the best cities for young workers based on affordability and job prospects. Turns out nine of the top ten are in the Great Lakes region and five of them, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Cleveland are in Ohio. Marketplaces, Kelly Wells,

based Not for Nothing in Cleveland, did some digging to figure out what put the Midwest at the top of that list. To be at the top of the list, a city has to have pretty low housing costs and low unemployment. It turns out the Great Lakes regions got both. When you look at Ohio, it has major hubs for education, for meds, aerospace, technology. Vicki Solemy is the career expert at Monster who wrote the report. She also used to be a job recruiter who remembers sifting through piles of resumes and says the piles were much higher in New York City and other major hubs. I wish the candidates new to apply to these outliers. There's less competition. And less competition translates to a much healthier job market.

Bejou Shah is president of Cleveland's Regional Chamber of Commerce. We have had sub three and a half percent unemployment now for three and a half years running. And that's even lower for those with college degrees. His organization, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, puts on this career fair at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame every year to help employers find young people to fill entry-level jobs. Talent is the issue when you've been running below three and a half percent unemployment for three years.

and you've got, you know, no end in sight to your demand. So the region earned the number five spot on Monsters List. But recruiters say a job offer is not enough to lock in an early career employee for the long term. Growth and development is one of the questions that we get all the time. Charles Donaldson is an early talent recruiter at the Cleveland-based paint company, Sherwin Williams. He says what comes after that first job is a top concern for the entry-level workers who decide to stay. They're looking for, am I going to be able to move around? where I be able to advance, like, what other opportunities are available for me once I get in.

It's the same kind of questions at the booth for Ohio-based Jelly and Jam Company, J.M. Smucker. Kelly Brucker-Davis manages that company's emerging talent. They want to know, do you have employee resource groups? What do you do for the interns? Do you offer professional development? Do you offer social opportunities and networking opportunities? Some of the young people at this event are happy with the answers they're getting. I think it's just a really good place to kind of start my, young professional life.

Yenny Song is a senior at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She's from Philadelphia, but she's planning to stick around the Lake Erie Shore after she graduates. There's a lot of new companies that are starting up that are getting based in Cleveland. We're in the surrounding cities. And I built a really great community of friends that I'm not sure I'll be able to find somewhere else. Plus, there's the whole buy a house for under a quarter million dollars thing.

Kids go to school and then we'll move to a large city where opportunities abound, but then, you know, the cost of living and other considerations quickly sort of set in. David Carter went to Northeastern University and had every intention of staying in the northeast. I was studying more marine science in Boston, and during the strange time that was the pandemic, I moved home and finished remotely. So he started applying for local internships, and one of the places he applied ended up offering

him a full-time job. So I've been there about two years now. He says he likes the slower pace and the quality of life in the Great Lakes region, enough that he's got no plans to leave. In Cleveland, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Coming up. Boosy, bottomless mimosa. It's 5 o'clock somewhere, right?

First, though, let's do the numbers. Down dust rose up 366 today, 7.10%, 52,048. The NASDAQ jumped 500 and at 99 points, 2.2%. 27,122. The S&P 500 climbed 114 points, about 1.5%. 7764 there. You heard about the Ohio job market from Kaley Wells. Lots of big companies have roots in the Buckeye State.

J.M. Smucker, based in O'Rville. Saw shares dip 2.5% on the day. Wendy's, headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, so shares dropped about 6 tenths percent. Shares of Procter & Gamble based in Cincinnati. Saw shares fall 2 tenths of 1%. Bad day for Ohio companies, right? Paramount Skydance. is merging with Warner Bros. Discovery is going to proceed now that the two companies have settled

with State Attorney's General. Warner Brothers, up 10 and 8 tenths percent on the day, Paramount, down two and nine-tenths. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Happy autumnal equinox Eve, everyone fall starts tomorrow afternoon. Cooler weather, earlier sunsets, and a merciful end to the busy summer travel season. For airlines, the typical seasonal slowdown in demand coincides with high and rising. jet fuel prices. And as Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports, that means the routes that airlines fly really do need to earn their keep. For all the dire warnings heading into summer about high jet fuel prices and potential shortages, Charles Duncan at Altitude X Aviation Group says it turned out to be a good

summer for airlines. Demand has been red hot. Of course, high fuel prices are not welcome, but I think overall the airlines have done well. Largely because they were able to pass on a lot of those costs in the form of higher airfares. But heading into fall and winter, when not as many people travel, Duncan says it's a bit of a different story. When you couple the weaker demand with a spike and even more elevated cost of jet fuel, that is a challenge for the industry. At the beginning of the year, jet fuel was a little over $2 a gallon on average. Now it's at $450 a gallon. An industry analyst Robert Mann says airline executives are not expecting it to come down anytime soon. And the result is that routes that were reasonably profitable and expected to be so

simply cannot be flown profitably at these higher prices. So airlines are starting to cut some of them to reduce their losses. Both routes and times of day on routes that are less profitable. Like flights that leave midday or midweek. George Ferguson at Bloomberg Intelligence says this signals to him that airlines don't have quite as much pricing power right now as they may have thought. And so they're, again, dialing back their offerings, trying to boost the ticket prices so they can recover all their increased costs. Jet fuel, of course, plus maintenance and labor costs.

Airlines have the same challenge that the rest of us do right now, and that is that everything is going up in price. Everything. And Ferguson says, if costs keep climbing, we may see airlines cutting back even more into next year. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. As times change, so too do our habits. We are eating healthier. We are drinking less. And so, according to the Wall Street Journal, a certain weekend staple is falling out of favor.

Lane Flauchim is a style report at the Wall Street Journal. Welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me on. Okay, from the headline, we regret to inform you that brunch is now officially dead. I guess my response is, really what happened? So we got this idea for this story because there are a number of restaurants in, in New York that have recently started serving lunch on the weekends. And they have these really, like, fun, elaborate lunch menus.

And so as I kind of started working on a story about lunch, it became, you know, that this idea of is brunch kind of over? And, you know, it's not that brunch has vanished off the face of the earth. So many restaurants still serve brunch. But the idea that kind of the most modern iteration of brunches we know at this kind of like boozy, bottomless mimosa. Eggs Benedict and French toast brunch might be a little passei in the year 2026.

Well, I am going to the wrong kind of brunches. Let me tell you that. But let's bring it down into its component parts. First of all, the people who are no longer going to brunch, why not? You know, I think we hear so much about how people are drinking less. And I think that the idea of, like, waking up on a Saturday or Sunday and having the first thing that you do go to a bottomless mimosa or Bloody Mary brunch is not as appealing. and I think people are, you know, they're doing more fitness and prioritizing their health.

So I think that's part of it. And then I think people are also looking for more exciting menus than, you know, the kind of like egg dishes and French toast and other kind of like carb heavy menu items that are often on, you know, being served for brunch. Yeah, that's totally fair. I get that on the carbs thing. Now, the restaurateurs, this is a business model decision for them. What's their thinking? I think for a lot of them brunch doesn't make as much financial. sense because, you know, if you're a restaurant that's open for lunch and dinner seven days a week,

that's 14 meal services. And so to change everything out for brunch, that's two meal services where you're bringing in new ingredients that take up space, you're having to train staff on how to prepare these two meals. And so it just doesn't make sense to do that for just two meal services a week for just brunch. Yeah, there was a, there was a quote from a guy who said, You know, we're not making pancakes on Mondays and Fridays, so we have to do it special for the weekends, and that just makes no sense. Right, exactly. All right, look, those of us who enjoy rolling out of bed on a Saturday or Sunday and going for a, you know, reasonable brunch, there are still options out there, right? There are definitely still options out there, and I think that a lot of people do really enjoy this kind of leisurely weekend lunch, both, you know, kind of within the restaurant industry.

One of the restaurants that I featured in the story is the Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, which is kind of, you know, this restaurant that has had a weekend lunch for, you know, 10 years when everyone else was doing brunch. And it's very inventive and they have an amazing wine program. So if you do want to drink, there's like, you know, there's still this great option, but it's not that kind of like, you know, bloody merry brunch service. Always good to have options. Here's the put up or shut up question. Are you a brunch person or not a brunch person? You know, I am not so much a brunch person. You know, a couple of the people who I talk to for the story were talking about how nice it is to go out for a solo lunch.

And I really like that. I think brunch is inherently a group activity. But going out for lunch by yourself can be a really, really enjoyable activity. I 100% endorse that. Solo dining at a restaurant, right? I totally endorse that. Absolutely. Lane, Floresheim at the Wall Street Journal.

Lane, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me. This final note on the way out today in which I'm just going to report, you all decide. I saw this on Bloomberg, a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta about tariffs, tariff refunds, to be precise. The Atlanta Fed surveyed 1,100 CEOs, and about a quarter of them said they had gotten a refund or were asking for one. Of them, three quarters, said they were going to hang on to the cash.

17 percent said they were going to give their customers refunds. I report, you decide. I'm here, Bibawi, Caitlin Ash, John Gordon, Neuerkar, Steve Mullis, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director. And I'm Kai Rizzdahl.

We will see tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.