Have no doubt that President Donald Trump will stand his ground against China and will eventually gain the upper hand for the United States in the ongoing trade war, Peter Morici, a syndicated columnist and economist at the University of Maryland, tells Newsmax TV. 

He cites Trump’s “willingness to go to the mat with China.”

Morici told Bill Tucker on "The Steve Malzberg Show" that he applauds Trump’s vow to declare China to be a currency manipulator. “And if it doesn't respond, are you willing to raise tariffs to bring it to the negotiating table?”

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“We're already in a trade war. China is closing its markets to us, shaking down our technology companies, subsidizing its exports and so forth, and we haven't joined the battle. So the thing to remember is if you fight back, China's got much more to lose than we do,” said Morici, who is also a Newsmax Finance Insider. 

“Their exports exceed our exports in bilateral trade 4-1. So when China says, well, if you slap a tariff on us, we'll slap one back on you, that isn't going to solve its problem,” he said.

“The reality is if we put a tariff on Chinese imports, and they put on a tariff on US exports, we're going to lose some exports and we're going to pay more for toasters. China? If we put a good tariff on their exports, they're going to have riots in Tiananmen Square and it's going to be an existential threat to the Communist party,” Morici said.

“Trust me. We have to have a president who's willing to go to the mat,” he said.

“The other thing is people will say, well gee, they hold all that debt. Let's dispel that right now. They hold a lot of US debt but if they sell those bonds in the open market, they get dollars. Those dollars then go out of circulation and they have pictures of George Washington, which basically pay no interest. If we can turn around, have the Fed print new dollars, buy up those bonds, and the net effect on the money supply and the exchange rate's the same, except that we don't have to pay them interest anymore,” Morici said. “They have no leverage,” he said of China.

“We can gain a great deal from globalization and we can't stop him. It's going to happen. The question is how we participate and under what rules,” he said.

“Under the Bush-Obama rules, we've done very badly. Really the Clinton-Bush-Obama rules we've done very badly. We've basically given China a free hand in our market. As a consequence, we have a $300 plus billion trade deficit with China, which costs us about, oh, 2.5 million jobs a year. That's dumb. If China won't open its markets, I don't know why our markets are open to China.”

(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).

Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist. He tweets @pmorici1

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