“North Korea is willing to hold talks with the United States on denuclearization and will suspend nuclear tests while those talks are under way, the South said on Tuesday after a delegation returned from the North where it met leader Kim Jong Un,” Reuters reports. “North and South Korea, still technically at war but enjoying a sharp easing in tension since the Winter Olympics in the South last month, will also hold their first summit in more than a decade next month at the border village of Panmunjom, the head of the delegation, Chung Eui-yong, told a media briefing.”
“‘North Korea made clear its willingness to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and the fact there is no reason for it to have a nuclear program if military threats against the North are resolved and its regime is secure,’ the head of the delegation, Chung Eui-yong, told a media briefing,” Reuters reports. “He also cited the North as saying it would not carry out nuclear or missile tests while talks with the United States were under way.”
“Washington and Pyongyang have been at loggerheads for months over the North’s nuclear and missile programs,” Reuters reports. “The agreement came on the heels of a visit made by a 10-member South Korean delegation led by Chung to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on Monday in hopes of encouraging North Korea and the United States to talk to one another… The South’s delegation leader, Chung, said he would travel to the United States to explain the outcome of the visit to North Korea and that he had a message from North Korea he will deliver to Trump.”
Read more in the full article here.
“U.S. stock index futures posted strong gains ahead of Tuesday’s open after North Korea expressed a willingness to talk about denuclearization,” Alexandra Gibbs reports for CNBC. “Around 8 a.m. ET, Dow futures were up 141 points, indicating a rise of 139 points at the open. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 futures also pointed to strong gains for their respective markets.”
“The moves in pre-market trade come after a strong finish on Wall Street Monday, where the Dow Jones industrial average soared more than 300 points by the close, bouncing back from weakness seen earlier on in the session,” Gibbs reports. “Last week, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would be imposing new tariffs on aluminum and steel, before going onto threaten European carmakers with a tax on imports if the European Union retaliated over the U.S. administration’s tariff plans. However, on Monday, fears eased after Trump suggested in a tweet that he could drop tariffs if a ‘new and fair’ NAFTA agreement was signed.”
“Also on Tuesday, investors will remain on edge for any further developments surrounding tariffs and trade negotiations,” Gibbs reports. “Trump is set to meet with Stefan Lofven, the prime minister of Sweden, where the two leaders are expected to talk about investment, global security and trade.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Stability is, of course, good for the economy, the markets, Apple, other multinationals, and, basically, everyone.
New all-time high for AAPL looming?
It took President Trump to start fixing this huge problem:
Obama national security adviser Susan Rice said Thursday that the U.S. has consistently failed to curtail North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, even during the Obama era.
“You can call it a failure,” Rice told CNN. “I accept that characterization of the efforts of the United States over the last two decades.”
Rice, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for eight years before transitioning to the role of national security adviser, said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has now vexed four successive American administrations, both Democrat and Republican. She said each administration has tried a range of measures, from sanctions and pressure, cooperation with China, and “other methods that we shouldn’t speak about on television,” to no avail.
Rice advocated in a Thursday morning opinion piece in the New York Times that President Trump should tamp down his rhetoric and learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.
Trump has retweeted views on Twitter that argue former President Barack Obama is to blame for the current escalated tensions with Kim Jong-Un and the perception that the U.S. is vulnerable to a nuclear attack.
Susan Rice is an idiot, but she’s right that Obama was a failure.
Will the mainstream media rightfully credit President Trump for North Korea’s new willingness to talk?
Nope, but thinking people will.
And what about the trade war he appears to be starting? The EU is threatening retaliatory tariffs if President Trump goes through wit his proposed tariffs. That may send the stock market back down today.
What appears to the simple-minded isn’t always reality.
My style of deal–making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.
Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning.
Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself.
I never get too attached to one deal or one approach…. I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it (a deal) work, because anything can happen, even to the best–laid plans.
Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.
— Donald Trump
As of late morning Tuesday, the Dow is down by just over 200 points since opening and Apple is down slightly as well. As I said yesterday, “Whatever the case may be in private business, a politician who offers other politicians a deal that he has no intention of keeping isn’t just slimy and unethical. Once it sinks in that he is not to be trusted, he will be totally ineffective.”
That is what is happening now. Time after time, the President has offered deals to his own party in Congress on health care, immigration, guns, trade policy, and more. Time after time, they have put together (at considerable political cost to themselves) exactly the bill that he had promised to sign, only to find that he had moved the goalposts.
“I want a deal on DACA,” turned into “I want a comprehensive solution to illegal immigration,” and then into “I want a complete rewrite of our legal immigration policies and I won’t sign anything less.”
One gathers that the NAFTA negotiations with Canada and Mexico have also involved a constantly “evolving” US position. Every concession on their part is treated as an admission of weakness and countered by a new American demand. The latest twist links NAFTA negotiations to avoiding steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
That latest case of moving the goalposts could be disastrous. “I want to make China stop exporting cheap steel to the US,” has turned into “I will tax steel imports from all ten of the US allies that sell more steel to America than the Chinese do,” then into “I will punish the foreign carmakers with a 35% tariff if their governments reply to my attack on their economies.” What is the next step when those carmakers lay off their US employees, who substantially outnumber the steel industry workforce?
Overreaching in dealing with North Korea could, in the worst case, not just harm the American economy but kill millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of US citizens. No wonder the Dow isn’t reacting with glee.
Trump’s DACA proposal was legitimate and very reasonable.
Democrats refuse to accept any deal that does not allow illegals to pour over our border. Democrats work harder for criminal illegals than they do for working Americans. Democrats know they need the illegal votes because they have no message that resonates with working Americans.
Barry,
Whether or not Mr. Trump’s original proposal on DACA was “legitimate and very reasonable,” it did represent a compromise that was politically viable. The only significant player who failed to support it was the President himself.
The Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress wrote a bill that gave him everything he had asked for (in a public, televised meeting no less). Both parties went out on a limb with their respective constituencies to write a bill that gave the President what he had asked for in terms of DACA, initial construction of The Wall, and a crackdown on illegal immigration. They did that ONLY because the President had promised to sign any bill that arrived on his desk and met his stated criteria.
The leadership in both parties figured it was worth the considerable political cost to reach a compromise. The Republicans knew they would pay a price for accepting a path to permanent residency for the “Dreamers.”
In return for that sacrifice, the Democrats paid an equally heavy price. They did not “refuse to accept any deal that does not allow illegals to pour over our border.” They signed off on a deal that committed essentially all the resources to border enforcement that the Republican leadership wanted… and that the President said he wanted. That agreement was very unpopular with the Democratic constituency, but the Senators and House Members were willing to fade the heat because it was the only way to pass the DACA replacement that the President had agreed to support.
Mr. Trump then spat in the faces of both parties by rejecting exactly the deal that he himself had suggested. As is his style, he saw compromise as a sign of weakness and raised his demands to include a complete rewrite of America’s laws on legal immigration… which had nothing to do with his original agreement.
So, instead of getting what the President originally wanted, he (and the American people) got nothing. The borders are LESS safe from illegal immigration than they could be. The prospects for a compromise reforming legal immigration are LESS bright than they were a few months ago. Against the overwhelming wishes of the American people expressed in every poll, hundreds of thousands of our neighbors who have been living peaceful and productive lives since before they reached adulthood are facing deportation.
There is no prospect that any of the goals Mr. Trump set out on immigration will be accomplished because nobody believes they can rely on his pledged word. Not one Member of Congress—Democrat or Republican—who got burned in the original breach of promise situation is likely to be willing, ever, to pay an additional price to reach any new deal that might be arbitrarily rejected as well.
The same is true of guns, health care, foreign policy, and nearly everything else. They have all suffered from a consistent Presidential pattern of offering a deal, letting the other side AND his own supporters pay the price for accepting the deal, and then escalating his demands. That might have worked in business, but it cannot work in politics because the willingness to stick by a bargain is the glue that holds the system together. There are no courts able to adjudicate political disputes.
Mr. Trump’s approach is equally nonviable in international relations. He might get away with “Take it or leave it,” but not with changing the deal after it is taken. America looks to be heading for a trade war because of it, for a breakdown of relations between the US and both of its neighbors, and possibly for an actual shooting war in the Korean peninsula. If that is avoided, we will need to thank South Korea for maintaining its position as an independent nation.
Of course they talk. They speak the same language.
I bet you agree that “President for Life” is fitting too.
The butthurt is strong with you. If only there was a cure for TDS and your hysterics…
Oh Kellyanne, you’re almost cute when you’re on the attack.
Hysterics….
I love it when a woman ignorantly chooses a sexist word.
I would need a uterus for that…
I was thinking more like a hysterical child. Thanks for proving my point btw
I’m just glad you’re thinking at all.
And said child woul still require a uterus.
We the voters see President Trump’s rapidly growing list of impressive accomplishments! And he has a sense of humor, too!
If you want give credit, then you should give it where it is truly due – South Korea’s government and leadership. SK began seeking diplomatic avenues to resolve the NK crisis after Trump made it clear that he would not do so. Trump also disparaged the Secretary of State for expressing interest in diplomacy rather than military action.
You can credit Trump with repeatedly threatening NK, if you like. But it is ridiculous for anyone to attempt to give Trump credit for diplomacy. He has not made any serious diplomatic efforts, as evidenced by placing the responsibility for Middle East peace on Kushner. Trump’s standard approach is a combination of blustery threats with occasional military action or escalation, as in Syria. But that has not really solved anything, because the Russians are still engaged, the Turks have shifted towards a totalitarian regime, and our purported allies, the Kurds, are still getting slaughtered by the Russians and Turks.
You should stop trying so hard to seek underserved praise for Trump. Besides, Trump says all kinds of things, and those statements are often contradictory from one day to the next, even one moment to the next. Trump is like a dog surrounded by a lot of people screaming “squirrel” and pointing in different directions. Eventually Trump gets frustrated and does or says something stupid. Then it starts all over again.
If you want to know what is likely to occur later in 2018 and in 2020, then watch the trends in the Texas primaries today. I am under no illusion that this blood red state will flip given the extreme gerrymandering by the Republican Party, but I strongly suspect that you are going to see a resurgence of grass roots Democrat strength in opposition to Trump and Trump supporters whose policies are largely poison to this country.
Of the four Republican Administrations since the 1970s, three have initiated tax cuts that enriched the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class and led to radically higher deficits – Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump. Interestingly, Both Reagan and W. Bush led this nation into massive economic difficulties around six or seven years into their respective administrations. The recent Trump tax cut (so-called tax “reform”) is no different. It will increase the deficit, increase the accumulated debt and, eventually, result in increased inflation and interest rates leading to more problems and a higher cost of debt service. A first term for Trump was a travesty, as he has demonstrated his incompetence and inability to lead. Chaos is *not* genius, and people are leaving the Trump ship in droves with few people of any ability willing to backfill those positions. There is no honor in the White House anymore – just nepotism and corruption and mouthpiece sycophants. A second term for Trump is unimaginable to me and many, many others.
At my precinct in Texas Trump Country this morning, 83 Republicans voted before I did. Just 44 Democrats had voted
Trump succeeds in one year were Obama failed in eight.
“Rice, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for eight years…”
This is not right. Rice was UN ambassador for four years.
Hey, I want to drink your Kool-Aid😀
North Korea better make sure they have a backup plan, peace is a threat to Apple’s home nation.
Remember what happened to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
Terrorists torture and they will not hesitate to torture you once they get the chance.
Oh, yes, poor Saddam Hussein. What a saint.
He got what was coming to him.
I can only hope Commodore Mom Pants receives a similar fate.
Without his/her iconic haircut. Notch of a different kind.
He sure did, that’s what happens when you deal with traitors to humanity.
Fwhatever and others, you fail to recognize that W. Bush’s war on Iraq was ill-conceived and unwise. Saddam was eventually found, but many Iraqi civilians and quite a few American and coalition soldier died in the process. And what was achieved? The rise of ISIS as the displaced Sunnis flowed back into a fragmented Iraq. Saddam was a piece of crap, but Bush’s Iraq war made things worse for many people. You and I have a big difference in our definition of a “win.” There were other ways to deal with Saddam and his regime.
Just to add to your points. The number of Iraqi civilians killed and still being killed are near genocidal numbers that would make Hitler proud. Saddam might have been a piece of crap, but the shrub is the Benedict Arnold of humanity.
Of course it will all be justified once that nuclear weapons program is found. Who knows there might still be some Iraqis around by that time.
I disagree. Saddam Hussein started two wars that killed two million people. He was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and he had already used them (chemicals) on his own people.
The number of deaths in Iraq dropped significantly after the war — that is, until Obama abandoned Iraq. Then, the killing increased again.
It this now “WallStreetDailyNews”? Did I happen upon the wrong site? Was I redirected to somewhere else?
What ever happened to “MacDailyNews”?
Is Apple a publicly-traded company? On Wall Street, no less?
Another one with TDS who can’t handle good news thanks to President Trump, even if it’s good for everyone, including Apple.
What a great president!
What accomplishments? The corporate tax welfare or the major increases in taxes (tariffs) proposed this week? The temporary income tax cut or the incrased inflation from trade wars that all citizens will have to pay for? This president hasn’t got a consistent idea in his head for more than 30 seconds at a time. We need a leader, not a media whore.
no administration official can stand to work with him for more than a year or so, it is obvious nothing will happen between now and the end of the Mueller investigation. This president doesn’t lead, he whines on twitter and wonders why his fact free rants don’t solve anything. One party controls all branches and they are all inept.
Eat another Tide pod…they’re good for you!
That anyone for one second actually believes that the beloved leader Kim is actually serious about removing even one single scientist / engineer from his nuclear programme is truly profoundly naïve.
Even if we disregard that for a moment, the fact that little Kim is dealing with South Korea directly, rather than with the US, must be very painful for the US president right now.
It is nice to see the stock markets bounce on the news, though.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS):
Is the new test for decency.
It’s actually a test for morons and you passed with 100%. Congrats!
Beats deplorable any day.