WSJ What’s News - Trump, Xi Scale Back Trade Tensions

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

A.M. Edition for Oct. 30. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emerged from their first face-to-face meeting in six years with a temporary truce in their trade fight. WSJ’s Meridith McGraw explains what the superpowers’ agreement entails. Plus, Trump says the U.S. will begin testing nuclear weapons on an “equal basis” with Russia and China. And, WSJ’s Katherine Clarke details why the Hamptons luxury housing market is staging a comeback for the ages. Caitlin McCabe hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Plus, Trump orders the Pentagon to start testing America's nuclear weapons. And we take a look at why the Hampton's real estate market is roaring back to life after years of sluggishness. We can see deals completely stall in the overall housing market, and yet $100 million homes are flying off the shelf in the ultimate. to luxury market. This is really its own stratosphere. It's Thursday, October 30th. I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News. The top headlines and business stories moving your world today. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have emerged from their first face-to-face meeting in six years with a number of steps to de-escalate trade tensions. The two leaders met for nearly 90 minutes at an air base in South Korea following a

bruising stretch of fighting over trade and technology. Following the meeting, Trump said the U.S. would lower tariffs on China in exchange for Beijing's cooperation in cracking down on the export of chemicals used to produce fentanyl. The journal's Meredith McGrath has been traveling with Trump on his swing through Asia and has more details on the meeting. said the meeting with President Xi Jinping was a success and even gave it a rating of 12 on a scale of 1 to 10. He said they were able to come to an agreement on a lot of trade issues and city expects them to be able to sign a deal soon that at least is going to stop some of the bleeding from their ongoing trade fight. When they first shook hands, President Trump called she his friend, but he did

most of the talking. And then they went into a separate room for a bilateral meeting where there were a bunch of senior officials. And she really appealed to Trump's desire to be seen as a kind of peacemaker and dealmaker, and he complimented him on the Gaza ceasefire. But he also recognized that they don't always see eye to eye. Trump said Taiwan did not come up in the meeting, and the president did not mention a TikTok deal. But he did say they talked about Ukraine and said they'll work together to get something done. But it's unclear if Trump put any kind of pressure on China for buying Russian oil. Meredith adds that the two superpowers came to agreements on other major sticking points, including on China upping its soybean purchases and easing its control on rare earth exports.

Trade negotiators really did a lot of the heavy lifting ahead of this meeting, but they did seem to walk away with some big things that they agreed to. For one, Trump said that he plans to lower the 20% fentanyl tariffs on China by 10% with the expectation that China will crack down on the chemicals that are used to make the drug. On soybeans, Trump said China is expected to commit to a significant purchase of American soybeans after farmers here were hit really hard by the loss of Chinese buyers. And on rare earths, Trump said China will postpone restrictions for a year. As for what's next, Meredith says the two leaders have more possible meetings in the months ahead. I would say they made progress and tensions at least for now have thought a little.

Trump did say he agreed to meet with Xi in April. And then he also plans to host the Chinese leader, potentially in Palm Beach or Washington, D.C. next year. Overall, I describe the encounter as friendly but cautious. They made progress here, but a lot remains unresolved. The meeting followed trade progress between the U.S. and South Korea, with both countries saying they agreed to terms on a trade deal. It was a surprise breakthrough following months of contentious talks between both nations. In a social media post, Trump said South Korea agreed to pay $350 billion in exchange,

for lower tariffs, while also touting the country's plans to buy American oil and gas in, quote, vast quantities. Staying with Trump. The president said on social media that he had ordered the Pentagon to begin testing America's nuclear weapons on an equal basis with Russia and China because of, quote, other countries' testing programs. It wasn't immediately clear what prompted the post. though Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week that Russia has tested a new type of nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear-powered underwater drone. In comments to reporters later, Trump said the White House plans to issue more details on the tests.

He declined to explain the reason for his move but said it didn't relate to China. The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for additional details. The U.S. hasn't conducted a nuclear weapons test since 19. and has joined Russia and China in observing a decades-long moratorium on underground nuclear blasts. And the Pentagon has ordered the National Guard to create quick reaction forces in every state and territory by January that are trained and equipped to respond to riots and civil unrest within the United States. That's according to Internal Defense Department memos. The directives show that as many as 500 soldiers in each state or territory, National Guard Organization will be assigned to deploy in the U.S. on short notice and receive

non-lethal training in crowd control, the handling of detainees, and use of batons, stun guns, and body shields. The control units are a major shift for the Pentagon and reinforce the Trump administration's push to directly involve the military in responding to protests and other domestic missions that have been off limits except in emergencies. Universal Music has settled a copyright dispute with Artificial Intelligence Music Generator UDio, leading to a new platform trained on licensed songs. The new subscription service will allow fans to create remixes and customize tracks with artist's permission required for music inclusion.

Details of the financial terms of the settlement weren't disclosed. The label and artists who opt in will be paid for music used for. training the model. Universal and the two other largest record labels, Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group, sued Udeo and Suno, another AI music platform last year. Coming up, remember all the reports about the ultra-rich ditching New York for Florida. Turns out some of them are returning and are scooping up luxury properties in the Hamptons. We explore the area's booming real estate market and more after the break. You know what's better than the one big thing?

Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS' five-year rate plan price lock. Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at TELUS.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. We go now to the eastern end of Long Island, where the real estate market is roaring back to life.

The Hamptons, which is New York's affluent beach vacation destination, is in the midst of a luxury real estate comeback for the ages after spending several years in the doldrums. Catherine Clark covers residential real estate for the journal and joins me now to discuss what's happening in this New York vacation hotspot. Catherine, thanks for being here. It seems like the high-end Hamptons market is on track for maybe its best year in more than two decades. Why is this happening? Yes, it's all very surprising in some ways. High-end real estate agents across the Hamptons have given us multiple reasons that this could be happening. For one, interest rates have come down a little bit.

And even though these high-net-worth individuals are not necessarily getting mortgages, many of them are in businesses that are affected by interest rates and borrowing conditions. The uncertainty of the presidential election is in the rear window. And then another part of this is that the shakeout that we saw post-COVID with all these super wealthy people moving to Florida has kind of shaken eye. Everyone landed where they've landed and there's been a reset that's happened. So who is buying these homes? Are those buyers returning to New York or is this a new crop of buyers coming in? It's interesting because I think we sort of thought that with all of these ultra-rich people moving to Miami and Palm Beach, that the Hamptons market might fall out of favor in a more permanent way? Was it this convenience market for all these wealthy people

working out of the city? And what these numbers show is that the Hamptons has more of an enduring appeal beyond that, and that in fact, many of the New Yorkers who move to Florida during the pandemic still want to spend their summers in the Hamptons when it gets too hot down there. We've also seen a wave of buyers coming from new markets like California, Tennessee, Tennessee, see, Texas. So it really runs the gamut. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. It seems like the interest in the Hampton's luxury market has sort of ebbed and flowed periodically. Do you think this is a turning point where this trend of buyers being really interested is more sustainable? Or could we see a reversal like we saw even pre-pandemic? Well, the Hamptons market, like you said,

has really been on a bit of a roller coaster ride this past decade. And a large, part of that, whatever way you split it, is that Hamptons is a second, third, or fourth home market for the wealthy. And therefore, it's always going to be more of a discretionary purchase. It's purely a luxury. And so any shift in the broader economy or the political landscape has an outsized effect on the Hampton's market. And so I don't think we can really make any solid predictions. And this all sort of is in stark contrast to the broader housing market just generally in the United States right now. Can this trend that we're seeing in the Hamptons tell us anything about the real estate market

in America more broadly? The very quick answer is no. The only thing we can really say with certainty is that this slice of the market behaves very differently than the rest of the market. We can see deals completely stall in the overall housing market and yet $100 million homes are flying off the shelf in the ultra luxury market. this is really its own stratosphere. Obviously, that speaks to the broader economic situation in the U.S. and the stark difference we see between the halves and halves and odds. That's Journal Residential Real Estate reporter, Catherine Clark. Catherine, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. And finally, you've probably been using the same web browser for years. And why would you switch when there's no real reason to? However, now there's a dizzying number of new options available, which include artificial intelligence browsers featuring built-in chatbots and advanced so-called agents. Just last week, OpenAI announced the ChatGBTatlas browser, and Microsoft Edge added an agent to co-pilot mode to join the likes of Gemini in Chrome, Comet from Perplexity, and Dia from the browser company. The journal's Nicole Nguyen has been testing some of these, and she told our tech news briefing podcast what sets them apart from your classic web browser. The most futuristic element to these AI browsers is that some have the ability to click and type around for you using an AI bot. So they take over your tab and you can watch this robot painfully, slowly look up flights or do whatever you task it with. And there's a kind of magic to letting it do a tedious task, like finding all the ingredients

for a recipe that I wanted to make and adding it to my Whole Foods cart on Amazon, for example. But there are also new risks with this kind of magic. A new kind of hacker attack called a prompt injection attack hides secret instructions for the AI chatbot, which are malicious in the URL or the website itself. And so you can really only do this on websites that you trust. But the beauty of using an AI browser versus using an agent inside of an AI chatbot is you don't have to hand over your credentials to the AI company in order for it to do its work. To hear the full interview with Nicole, tune into tomorrow's Tech News Briefing podcast. And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Bollivant.

Our supervising producer was Michael Cosmides. And I'm Caitlin McCabe for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.