The poster child recently for this sort of thing was the US pumping out hundreds of thousands of bbl of oil to create a glut and push prices down. This hurt some of our middle eastern allies but it hurt Russia much harder. It is sort of a sanction without a sanction, rather than tell people they can't buy Russian oil, push the price of oil down with your own supply so that the Russians can't use it to prop up their economy.
The article talks about how this action undermines the Chinese leadership by taking money out of the pockets of people who are needed to support the status quo. It also puts pressure on their economy for which they have limited options for correcting. They mention adjusting the exchange rate, which might work but that percolates through the economy in hard to control ways.
And, in fact, oil's lowest prices were met because OPEC, with Saudi Arabia leading I think, continued massive production even as global supply increased, to drive the price down to the point that shale oil is no longer profitable and put shale oil companies out of business.
Yes. See: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/29/investing/us-oil-exports-beg...
Look at the date of the article. And it worked.
You don't have to compel companies to do things, you can arrange the world such that they want to on their own.
> you can arrange the world such that they want to on their own
The US government didn't arrange for the oil to be in the shale. I don't know if it funded research into cheaper extraction from shale or if the companies figured that out on their own but even if they did, there are much better reasons to do so than hoping to screw with Russia at some point in the future.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi_currency_value#Histor...
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that we’ve been sold out. At the very least, “Made in China” is a curse that the general conspiracy of corruption has put on us. In my opinion though, all the major world leaders are puppets who’ve been bought and paid for and are easily controlled.
I know HN hates conspiracy talk but IMO the unity of opposites dictates that if there are altruistic groups of people, there are evil groups of people and it’s not that far-fetched to believe that some rich and powerful people might get together and try to rule the world once in a while.
If you cant build your product because a component you relied upon is now 25% more expensive, you're continued existence is predicated on having deep reserves. Many smaller companies don't and even the larger ones will have to implement deep layoffs relatively quickly to conserve resources as they won't know how long the trade war will last.
This in turn will have an effect on the political situations in both countries although primarily America as its the democracy. Globalization and the economic relationships amongst nations now has a direct effect on the internal politics of those same states.